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Minnie Driver has claimed the acting industry has evolved for the better since she first became famous almost three decades ago.

The Oscar nominated actor, 54, gained notoriety with her role in the 1995 romance Circle of Friends alongside Chris O’Donnell. She then went on to star in a wide range of notable films, including the dark comedy Grosse Pointe Blank and Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting, which saw her nominated for numerous awards for her role as Skylar.

Driver said opportunities for women in the entertainment industry have changed since the start of her career with more roles available for actors no longer in their 30s.

Speaking during a panel hosted by People, Entertainment Weekly and Starz, Driver said: “We’re allowed to be over 40 now. It is different.”

The Good Will Hunting star added the industry had begun “waking up to the idea that women are really just hitting their stride” after years of going “through the gauntlet of only being seen sexually” throughout their careers.

Driver added that female sexuality is no longer women in Hollywood’s “apparent power” and that roles for women now feature the “extraordinary expansiveness that comes with getting older”.

The Return to Me actor admitted she’d recently watched a film she would not want to be a part of now but that her younger self would have competed for a chance to be in.

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Driver added she had been “conditioned” into thinking the limited number of female roles on offer were the “best” because so many actors were “vying” for the same job.

“These were the kind of dynamics that we were fighting for, longing for,” she said. “And you realise now there is so much more variety of what is asked of a female actor, which is invigorating and amazing.”

It comes after Driver recently admitted it would have been the biggest mistake” of her life to marry the Marvel actor Josh Brolin.

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The actor revealed in her 2022 memoir Managing Expectations that she discovered at the age of 12 that her parents had never married as her father was already married to a different woman, and had a second family.

“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,” she 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.”

She continued: “The one time I was engaged it would have been, I think, the biggest mistake of my life.”

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