Minnie Driver vs. Toni Collette
Battle of the Former Fatties

For the record: dude, we don't care what Toni Collette and Minnie Driver look like. (Though for what it's worth, we think they both look great, and always have.) But perhaps you can cast your mind back, way back -- seven years back, almost to the month. Muriel's Wedding and Circle of Friends -- the movies that first brought Collette and Driver (respectively) to the attention of American audiences -- were released five days apart in March of 1995. Immediately, they were paired up in countless magazine articles examining the trendlet of movies featuring average-sized women (bearing in mind that "average-sized" in the real world translates to "morbidly obese" on screen) seeking love -- specifically, seeking the love of men more conventionally attractive than themselves. (When we were first learning about Driver and Collette -- and had never seen them except as Benny in Friends and the titular Muriel, respectively -- articles about them often made a point of noting that both women had gained weight to play the roles that put them on the map. In other words, No need to worry, America! They're not really fat girls, they just play them in the movies!)

So Collette and Driver each dropped a few pounds and went about building post-fattie careers. Collette stuck close to her indie roots, starring in small but well-regarded movies like Cosi, Emma, Clockwatchers, and Velvet Goldmine. Thus did Collette establish that she had no burning need to displace Sandra Bullock from the top of the romantic-comedy heap; rather, she earned a reputation as a fine character actor, as opposed to a movie star. When she finally did star in an old-fashioned, big-budget American studio film -- The Sixth Sense -- she earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for it.

For her part, Driver followed Friends with a bit part in the James Bond blockbuster GoldenEye, and a supporting role in Barry Levinson's cute-boy-a-thon Sleepers. Soon enough, she was sharing movie posters with John Cusack (for Grosse Pointe Blank) and getting above-the-marquee billing for a completely forgettable, utterly generic "action" "thriller" (Hard Rain). Driver also got her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination -- and two years earlier than Collette's -- for Good Will Hunting, but in the first place, that was generally acknowledged to be a result of the movie's overall award-season momentum, rather than anything she accomplished in her sassy, then pitiful performance; in the second, the big Minnie Driver story coming out of Good Will Hunting was her dating and subsequently getting dumped by co-star Matt Damon. (To give Driver her due, amid all the event films and explosions, she also landed a relatively small but important part in the food-porn classic Big Night, holding her own among acting legends Stanley Tucci, Ian Holm, Allison Janney, and Tony Shalhoub.)

So, let's tally up. Now, you can see Toni Collette in decent popcorn movies like Changing Lanes and Shaft, as well as in artier, hoitier fare like this week's About a Boy and the upcoming The Hours. On the other side of the ledger, Driver did return to the art-house ghetto that launched her career in the first place -- headlining The Governess and co-starring in An Ideal Husband -- between voicing an animated Disney heroine (Tarzan), pretending to have heart disease (Return to Me), and mentally abusing her young though annoying daughter (Beautiful). The less said about the rather heaping handful of recent straight-to-tape efforts on her CV, the...whoops. That just slipped out. But...The Upgrade? Slow Burn? She's Shannon Tweed now?

Perhaps Driver shot her wad too early, jumping straight from a charming, slight confection to full-on American movie-stardom. Perhaps Collette was just more talented all along, and therefore coasted the more smoothly along the road of her career. Either way, it's clear: however similar the ugly ducklings' screen débuts, they have grown apart since then -- one into an E!-promoting, Brolin-dating movie star, and the other into an accomplished actor. Guess which is which?

Advantage: Collette.