Minnie Driver says marrying Josh Brolin would have been "the biggest mistake of my life".

The 54-year-old actress - who has 15-year-old son Henry with former partner Timothy J. Lea - got engaged to Josh, 56, back in 2001 but the pair called things off just five months later and Minnie feels it was the best decision for everyone.

Speaking to The Times magazine, she said: "The one time I was engaged, it would have been, I think, the biggest mistake of my life."

Minnie - who also had a high-profile romance with Matt Damon - explained that the relationship of her parents, Gaynor and Charles, affected her own views on relationships as they never married due to her father's infidelities.

She said: "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.

"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.

"But now I’m with someone [the American writer and director Addison O’Dea] who doesn’t want to get married but who is the most devoted, loving, extraordinary… Everything I could have wanted in my childhood idea of a husband, he actually is."

Minnie and Addison have been dating since 2019.

Meanwhile, the actress also opened up about taking a step back from making films after her son Henry was born in 2008.

She said: "It’s why I stopped making movies, really consciously. I called my agent and went, ‘OK, I’m having a baby and I would really like you to go and look for a show… in Los Angeles and will pay me a regular wage.

"As a single mum, I didn’t want him to have that uncertainty. I wanted him to have school and football and mates and tea and his own bed and our house.

"And it was so lovely because with what you consciously give your children, you can perhaps at the same time be giving yourself the thing that you did not have."