Minnie Driver takes the wheel again

Missed Minnie Driver?

No worries. You’ll be seeing — and hearing — a lot more of her.

In the next few weeks, the wavy haired Brit will have delivered a new album, performed in concert, appeared in a new big-screen musical and marked the start of the second season of her latest TV series, About a Boy (NBC, Tuesday nights).

Based on the 1998 Nick Hornby novel and 2002 film starring Hugh Grant, the series spins around a man-child, the neighbor kid he befriends and that boy’s sometimes overbearing mother, Fiona.

“She’s odd, and, you know, I don’t ever want to ever play anything linear and unconflicted,” Driver told the AP by phone from New York. “It’s fun playing a messy person.”

And both Fiona and Driver can sing. In the show’s season-one finale, Fiona/Driver served up a spot-on a capella reading of the hymn Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Last week saw the arrival of Driver’s third album for the Rounder Zoe label, Ask Me to Dance, a compilation of her favorite covers ranging from Frank Sinatra to The Cure.

Next month, the single mom is back in the music business, but as an actress on the big screen playing what Driver called “a mean momager” in the musical Beyond the Lights.

Some 17 years after her breakthrough, an Oscar-nominated role in Good Will Hunting, Driver isn’t taking her multi-faceted career for granted: “The grace of being 44 years old is that you wake up every day with a conscious breath going, ‘This is absolutely amazing, that this is happening to me. And this is my life and I am deeply deeply grateful.’”

This story was originally published October 15, 2014 at 5:56 PM with the headline "Minnie Driver takes the wheel again."