Minnie Driver’s memoir spills the beans on Matt Damon, Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood

“A tell-most,” is how Minnie Driver describes her moreish memoir. Refreshingly free of the self-mythologising therapy gush that makes most thespy autobiographies just a bore, it’s a collection of bittersweet essays, in which the 52-year-old star of 1990s classics Good Will Hunting and Grosse Point Blank repeatedly rolls her eyes at the “absurdity” of a life spent precariously balanced between pain and privilege.

Although her book is more focused on her family than her career, Driver’s crisp, un-self-pitying British wit slices through the sillinesss and sexism of her industry. She reduces her complicity in the dull churn of celebrity to “I wore the dresses. I held the bags.” And she rejoices in her victories against it, waiting until the cameras were dropped to flash her knickers at paparazzi who had been lying in gutters trying to “upskirt” her. In an early audition for a chocolate commercial she describes being asked to fake an orgasm over a particularly unpalatable product. She manages it once. But baulks when the male director asks her to do it again, “bigger” for the Dutch market. As she leaves, the man yells that all the other girls had “enjoyed” the experience. Driver’s comeback is delicious: “They faked it.”

I’ve always loved Driver for her refusal to play nice. Unrepentantly tall, frizzy haired, a bit weird and clever, she was “our girl on the inside” for my generation of bookish girls. But I’ll admit to some equivocation over her poshness. Did the inherited combination of wealth from her financier dad and beauty from her ex-couture model mum make it all a bit easy for her to cock a snook where the rest of us might have bitten our tongues?

Now she reveals that those advantages came with a price. Both Driver’s parents believed in tough love and, as a child, she responded with flailing anger and sadness. Her mother Gaynor wasn’t married to her father, Charles. He was married to another woman throughout his relationship with Gaynor, which ended when Minnie was seven. Hoping for a jolly new life with a country vet, Gaynor discharged her girls’ beloved nanny and whisked them off to a ramshackle Hampshire cottage called Mildmay (swiftly nicknamed Mildew).

Driver’s affable, blond-haired elder sister, Kate, was able to make nice with both her new stepdad and her father’s new girlfriend. But difficult, dark-mopped Minnie challenged the interlopers’ rights. When her stepfather slapped her on the face, she drew around the handprint in black marker pen. Looking back, she recalls it felt “like putting a trophy on a shelf, like tattooing on your body the name of someone you will come to not love”. The triumph was short lived. Driver’s mother packed her off to boarding school. When she made rude comments about her father’s girlfriend’s bikini, he banished her from his luxurious Barbados house, sending her home alone on the plane.

The most poignant chapter in her book is the one about the subsequent 24-hour stop-over she spent in a Miami hotel, where the other guests’ shock that she was there all alone makes her eyes smart. She punishes her dad by putting a mountain of tat from the hotel gift shop on his credit card. Attempting to enjoy the famous pool alone, she realises she has nobody to play with, and the other kids’ cries of “Look at me, Mum!” make her realise that “90 per cent of parenting is bearing witness”. She was unbearably vulnerable. When a strange man invited her into his poolside cabana with the warning about the “bad people” who might prey on a child alone, I wanted to scream at her failure to clock that he might be one of them.

But as Driver grew, she formed deeper attachments to her parents and slowly wised up to threats from the outside. She reveals that, a few days after she auditioned for Good Will Hunting (1997), producer Harvey Weinstein tried to have her removed from the project. “Nobody would want to f--- her,” he said. Driver was understandably furious. How dare this man “whose shirts were always aggressively encrusted with egg/tuna/mayo, who terrified and revolted in equal measure, and who lived within a cloud of yellowed cigar smoke” call her undesirable? She was delighted when the writers (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) and director (Gus Van Sant) forced Weinstein back into his box by refusing to make the film without her.

Even though fans know what happened next, her writing drags you with her as she describes the thrill of being a star ascendant, as her on-screen romance with Damon blossomed into the real thing. Today she shrugs: “Making something with a person you admire, bringing it to life and making it tangible, can feel like love. I ignored the fact we were both actors […] My heart set on his horizon and I was pretty much done for.”

She doesn’t whitewash the embarrassing fit of hubris in which she dumped her British agent and signed up with Damon’s LA team. Or her humiliation when he dumped her, live, on a talk show and – pursued by the paparazzi – she was left wandering supermarkets in the small hours, wheeling her trolley past aisles of gossip magazines with photos of her ex snogging his new lover on their covers. The rollercoaster tilted upward again as she was nominated for an Oscar in the role, only to tilt back downward as her dress slipped from her breasts during a red carpet photoshoot. When she took her seat at the ceremony, her dad leaned over to warn, “Darling? You’re not going to win.” A brutal lack of parental cheerleading. But also a truth that ensured she kept her face straight as Kim Basinger accepted the award.

There are terrific, moving chapters on Driver becoming a single mother and on losing her own mum to cancer. With a certain grit – not denying an over-emotional backwash – she has emerged as a happy woman. She has sailed her own course as a lone parent and finally appears to have met the man of her dreams in documentary-maker Addison O’Dea. I bet the stories she’d tell in private over a few martinis are way funnier and more shocking than the ones she has dished here. But this book is also way closer to proper chat with the stars than readers are normally offered. And way sadder, and way funnier. Haha, Minnie. Haha.

Managing Expectations is published by Manilla at £20. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk