DRIVER'S RANGE

From Versace and Valentino to the simple cotton Ts Minnie dyes herself, this sought after actress knows what works--and wears it well. By Leslie Marshall

At 4 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, actress Minnie Driver sits in the shade of a lovely walled garden, serving tea. "Do you take milk?" she asks in the deferential tones of an acolyte as she looks up and across the table with earnest brown eyes. "Sugar?" she murmurs. A split second later, as a passing breeze lifts her dark Botticelli ringlets off her shoulders, Driver executes a classic dramatic maneuver. She tips her head way back to soak in the glory of the day and lets loose a smile that seems wide enough to swallow the world. "Oh, God!" she exclaims, as she slips like quicksilver from the demure to the sensuous. "It's so lovely, isn't it?"

If the moment, with it's interplay of great manners and great passion, feels like an outtake from a Merchant Ivory film, the sensation is primarily a testament to the innate romantic presence of the 27-year old actress holding the teapot. Driver is actually seated in the garden of the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, within earshot of the traffic on Sunset Boulevard. Less than 24 hours ago she was glamming past cameras at the MTV Movie Awards in a purple Valentino dress; later this afternoon she intends to catch the second half of a Chicago Bulls playoff game. Indeed, she makes no claim to being anything other than a thoroughly modern Minnie; and yet, put her in garden pouring tea, and Driver inadvertently exudes all the classic grace of a Jane Austen heroine.

Perhaps it is this--her subtle, contradictory aura of both power and vulnerability--that accounts for Driver's appeal on screen. Or perhaps it is the physical spectacle that her more than 5-foot-10-inch, broad-shoulder frame and wide, well-boned face present. What's certain is that ever since her film début in 1995--when she gained 25 pounds to play the plump Benny in Circle of Friends--British-born Driver has been someone filmgoers have found fascinating. After Circle of Friends they watched a slimmed-down version of Driver in films like Goldeneye, Grosse Point Blank and Big Night. With her Oscar-nominated performance as Matt Damon's sexy, Harvard-educated lover in the hugely successful Good Will Hunting, however, the way the world is watching Minnie Driver has escalated to near-stalking mode.

"Everything changed with Good Will Hunting. I went from being the girl next door to being a siren in a red dress on the cover of People magazine," says Driver, as she describes her metamorphosis into a major movie star. "Nobody was more surprised than I," she adds. When Driver's onscreen romance with Damon became an offscreen affair that then ended abruptly and publicly, Driver watched her private life become chum for gossip-hungry tabloids. "So many people tell you about this, but until you've experienced it you can't really imagine what it's like," says Driver, describing what she calls the "unspoken deal"--the interfacing of your public and private lives--that comes with major success in Hollywood.

And yet Driver seems to have come through it all unscathed, with both her self-assurance and her real-world roots intact. As she sits in a thin, lilac cardigan over a simple Italian dress, bare-legged with rainbow-colored lizard-skin mules on her feet, there is a creative interplay of simplicity and glamour that translates into not just a true sense of style, but the expression of a real life being lived; the shoes and the sweater she is wearing today are both Versace, for instance ("This is not usual," she insists), but the lilac cardigan has a broken button, and the sandals will show up later on Minnie's older sister Kate, with whom she shares a recently acquired Los Angeles house, a production company (called Two Drivers), and--evidently--footwear.

"In order to know what works well on your body you have to be comfortable with it. That's the grail," says Driver, who cites her mother, Gaynor Churchward, as her first and most important style mentor. "My mother has phenomenal taste. She lived in Italy and Paris for years; she was a model, and she is a designer now. She showed me how to understand yourself best in terms of clothes. I remember the moment of realizing that I had no self-esteem as a girl," continues Driver, as she recounts her own loss of innocence in terms of physical self-consciousness. "There was a very grown-up girl that I met one summer, and she pointed out all these things about my body that I needed to change in order to get boys. I was never the same after that, although Circle of Friends was really a big exorcism of fears." Another important source of both pain and eventual growth for Driver was the divorce of her parents when she was nearly 7. "I think divorce has ramifications--which aren't anybody's fault--of abandonment," says Driver. "But if you take the crime out of it and see the positive, you can actually find something that has blossomed in its place." For Driver, who moved back to England with her mother and sister from the family home in Barbados after the divorce, many positive aspects of change came with her enrollment at Bedales, a progressive boarding school in Hampshire, England. "Bedales was really extraordinary," says Minnie. "You were encouraged to write as much as possible--stories and poetry and things called observations, which were dissertations on some mundane action like drinking a cup of tea," Driver explains.

When Driver gets going about certain style preferences, her Bedales training finds full expression. While describing her quest for the perfect T-shirt, for instance, she slips into the "observation" mode: "I'm really big into Petit Bateau. I just bought a bunch of their white T-shirts--it's the best cut. Really thin T0shirt material; they're long and they shrink up to perfect level. They have a sharp shoulder, a kind of forties look, and a really good, little capped sleeve and very little hem. The neck is round, not too high, just kind of perfect on your collar-bone." Proving that she is resourceful as well as analytic, Driver suggests that "you can get a bucket and dye them different colors. I made a really good pink one and a really good lilac."

Thin cotton, it turns out, is a minor obsession of Driver's. "I hate layers and feeling like the Michelin man," she says. I love really thin jersey, think silk. When you're tall and broad-shouldered and long-legged it doesn't do you any favors to wear big clothes. I'm a flat-front trousers girl. I hate pleats and pockets. I like trousers that do up the side with no button."

As it turns out, her habit of making precise observations about life has found more than one artistic outlet. In addition to writing a journal, poetry and music (including songs she recently recorded for a Two Drivers film with the working title At sachem Farm, which she also stars in), Driver writes letters. "I write letters, but I don't send a lot of them," says Driver. "Writing but not sending letters, especially to lovers, is a very good way of deconstructing psyche. It's like counting to 10." Driver, who has had to weather the tabloid interpretations of both her Damon romance and her subsequent affair with Foo Fighters drummer, Taylor Hawkins, may have had her share of counting to 10 recently. But the process has paid off. "It takes a while to appreciate the gift of loss, but it's there. When a love affair ends it may take a while to see what's grown in its stead, but usually it's you," says Driver. "That's the consolation prize, and it's a much bigger gift than having a relationship with some crappy bastard who doesn't want to be with you anyway," she adds with a delightful, throaty giggle.

Indeed, as Driver lights a cigarette and tips her had back again to stare up at the sky, she seems to have something much bigger, something long-standing, to worry about. "The thing that I really find frightening is the notion of homogeneity and stereotype. The notion that one might be perceived to be able to do anything," says Driver. Given her recent role in The Governes and three upcoming films (At Sachem Farm, Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, and a thriller called Slow Burn), this hardly seems to be a risk. But this is a woman who's aiming for a life beyond Hollywood, a life as rich and full and joyous as her gorgeous smile. "I want to have a family, I want to be with somebody, to have children. I want to stay working. I want to write. I want to carry on writing music, and have a big creative house by the sea with kids and friends and family, and be able to go off and make one film that you really love every couple of years," she says in a rush. "I think I want Meryl Streep's life. I think that's what I want."

In the meantime, the second half of that Bull's game will do.