Minnie Driver’s complicated family dynamics almost led to her making the “biggest mistake” of her life.
“If I look at my history, what it did was make me want to be married so much and then choose men who were so not the right men to be married to,” Driver told The Sunday Times. “So I would carry on longing to be married and to have that conservative version [of a relationship], find men who had no interest in that, and then if one did, run a mile.”
Driver’s parents split up when she was 6, and when she was 12 she learned that they had never been legally married. Throughout the relationship, her father was married to another woman with whom he shared another family.
Minnie Driver learned when she was 12 that her father had a secret family. (Getty Images)
She admitted, “The one time I was engaged it would have been, I think, the biggest mistake of my life.”
Josh Brolin and Driver first met when filming “Slow Burn.” The couple became engaged in April 2001 but split in October of the same year.
“Minnie Driver and Josh Brolin have decided to cancel their wedding plans. Their decision is mutual and amicable,” a statement shared by her publicist at the time read, per ABC.
Representatives for Driver and Brolin did not immediately return Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Minnie Driver and Josh Brolin were engaged briefly in 2001. (Jeff Spicer/Getty Images; SGranitz/WireImage)
Brolin went on to marry Diane Lane in 2004. They divorced in 2013. In 2016, he married Kathryn Boyd, who he is still with today.
Driver has never been married, but is currently in a relationship with writer and director Addison O’Dea.
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“Now I’m with someone who doesn’t want to get married but who is the most devoted, loving, extraordinary…” she said. “Everything I could have wanted in my childhood idea of a husband, he actually is.”
Driver has been dating Addison O’Dea since 2019. (Kayla Oaddams/FilmMagic)
When her mother left her father, Driver recalled that the courts told her that to maintain custody of her children, she had to buy a house and be remarried in seven weeks. She managed to get it done, but Driver confessed that she didn’t particularly care for the man she married.
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“I had such an aversion to my stepfather,” she said, adding that she believed her mother told her about her father’s secret family “in quite a selfish way, to try to make me feel better about her choices.”
Minnie Driver poses for a photo with her sister and parents in March 1998. (Brenda Chase/Stringer)
She added, “As opposed to explaining to her kid what was going on, she told me in a fight, in a moment of rage, which was not good, but I understand it. Maybe that’s about getting older – all the faulted stuff about your parents you just go, ‘Oh yes, I know why they did that, because I did something similar last week.’”