MINNIE DRIVER

(Aug. 28, 1998) -- Sometimes it's not enough to earn rave reviews in your starring debut or even to earn an Oscar nomination.

Sometimes it doesn't even help to be plastered all over the media because of a high-profile affair -- and even more explosive breakup.

Sometimes if you want to play substantial, worthwhile roles, you have to go out and find them. That's what Minnie Driver is doing.

The 27-year-old English actress has discovered that if she sits back and lets Hollywood do the picking, she ends up with supporting roles, such as her part opposite Christian Slater in the all-wet action flick Hard Rain.

But if she pursues good scripts, she lands more intriguing, offbeat leading parts, such as the title role in The Governess.

The character Rosina Da Silva is colorful and multifaceted. She's in nearly every scene and propels the action.

"But it's not just the chance to play someone who is on camera all the time, but because the character isn't run-of-the-mill," Driver says, in a phone interview.

"She has a high emotional IQ. She's incredibly passionate -- and she's doing all of these things for the first time. That was attractive to me -- to remember what it was like to be at the beginning stages of so many things."

The character is also a Sephardic Jew in 1840 London, which makes her a stranger in a strange land. "I really identify with that, because I've come to Hollywood from England. I sort of reinvent myself with everything I do."

Driver first tried to get her career going in English theater, without much success. Instead, she turned to television. Her break, though, was being cast by Pat O'Connor as a naive Catholic schoolgirl in the hit film Circle of Friends.

She went on to various substantial supporting roles in Goldeneye, Big Night, Sleepers and Grosse Point Blank, and then scored another bull's-eye, getting an Oscar nomination as part of the award-winning ensemble of Good Will Hunting.

That also led to a much-publicized romance with co-star Matt Damon, and a subsequent breakup, neither of which she'll discuss at this stage in her life.

Driver noticed, though, that after a substantial leading role in Circle of Friends, her parts were increasingly supporting roles. She was eager for more leads.

So she and her older sister, Kate, formed Two Drivers, their own production company, to seek challenging work.

Like other high-profile actresses, Driver has learned that women normally aren't offered as many good lead roles as men. They have to look for them.

"A woman can't start too soon to do this," Driver says. "If you know what you like and can't find it out there, the least you can do is try to find it and develop it."

Driver has since finished work on her company's first film, At Satchem Farm, a comedy with Nigel Hawthorne and Rufus Sewell.

"Nigel plays a guy who's part Gandhi and part King Lear," she says, "and he's trying to orchestrate the evolution of the people in his life who he loves -- and they're running around like headless chickens, all in wrong relationships."

She'll next move on to a desert thriller called Slow Burn, with Robert Downey Jr. and Josh Brolin. Driver hopes to keep doing about one film a year in her native England while continuing to develop her Hollywood career. She lives with her family when she's in London and also has a home in Los Angeles.

Beyond acting, Driver wants "to write, and to produce stuff that I've written."

Does she already have a self-penned script in her back pocket? "Doesn't everyone?"

-Jack Garner for Democrat and Chronicle