Giving new meaning to the term America's Sweetheart, Sandra Bullock won
over scores of filmgoers and critics with her wholesome, exuberant
portrayals of ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances. Since her
breakthrough role as Speed's unwitting heroine, Bullock has enjoyed the
type of popularity that was in the past reserved for actresses along...
Born in Washington, D.C., on July 26, 1964, Bullock was the elder daughter
of a vocal coach dad and an opera singer mom. Touring through Europe with
her mother, Bullock was given her first taste of show business while still
a child. Back in the States, she attended high school in Virginia and was
a popular cheerleader, whose classmates dubbed her the person Most Likely
to Brighten Your Day. After a stint at East Carolina University, Bullock
took her sunny nature to New York, where she began concentrating on an
acting career. After tending bar and studying her craft with dramatician
Sanford Meisner, she got her start with a number of stage productions. It
was for one of these productions, the off-Broadway No Time Flat, that
Bullock received a rave review for her portrayal of a Southern belle, the
strength of which was enough to land her an agent.
Television work followed, with a small role in the 1989 Bionic Showdown:
The Six-Million-Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman and, after her migration
to Los Angeles, Melanie Griffith's role in the short-lived television
version of Working Girl. Miraculously surviving the widespread career
fallout that surrounded her first starring film role in Love Potion No. 9
(1992), the actress went on the following year to star in the similarly
ill-fated The Thing Called Love. However, things began to look up the same
year when the struggling actress became the last-minute replacement for
Lori Petty in the Sylvester Stallone action flick Demolition Man. Though
her role was essentially limited to intermittent saliva exchanges with
Stallone, her performance won the attention of the film's producer, Joel
Silver, who in turn recommended her to Jan de Bont. De Bont, then in the
process of casting his upcoming bus-with-a-bomb action film, chose the
struggling actress for the part of Annie, the film's reluctant heroine. In
casting Bullock against Keanu Reeves, de Bont reportedly came up against
considerable resistance from studio executives, who wanted someone blonde
and buxom for the part.
The director persevered and, in 1994, Bullock took
her place in movie history as part of Speed, one of the most successful
action films ever made. The film propelled the actress to stardom.
Doors now wide open, Bullock next starred in the 1995 romantic comedy
While You Were Sleeping. The film was a critical and commercial hit, and
the actress followed it up with a screen adaptation of John Grisham's A
Time to Kill, co-starring Ashley Judd and Matthew McConaughey. The success
of that film was the last that Bullock would enjoy for a while, as she
then entered something of a sophomore slump with disappointments such as
In Love and War (1996), Two If By Sea (1996), and, perhaps most
excruciating, Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997). Fortunately for Bullock, her
audiences seemed to be inclined to forgive and forget, and she had a
modest rebound with the following year's Hope Floats, which also happened
to be the first project of the production company she founded, Fortis
Films.
The same year, Bullock also starred in another romantic comedy,
Practical Magic, opposite Nicole Kidman. The film provided another modest
success for Bullock, who, back in the saddle again, proceeded to do yet
another romantic comedy, this time starring with Ben Affleck in Forces of
Nature (1999). Although the film proved to be a critical and commercial
disappointment, Bullock was back on the radar with a number of projects in
2000, including the critically disembowelled comedy Gun Shy and 28 Days, a
comedy that starred the actress as a newspaper columnist forced to enter
rehab after her drinking problem assumes uncontrollable proportions.
Following her role in Miss Congeniality (2000) as an FBI agent forced to
go undercover in the Miss U.S.A. beauty pagent in order to prevent a
bombing, Bullock faced off against a more low-key menace in the thriller
Murder By Numbers (2002) before returning to lighthearted drama with
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (also 2002).
