| BIOGRAPHY
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 the lines of Mary Pickford or Shirley Temple.
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, surprising no one more than Bullock herself, who later
remarked, "never in a million years did I think a bus movie
would open every door I ever possibly wanted open."
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). |
FILMOGRAPHY
• Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002)
• Murder by Numbers (2002)
• Two Weeks Notice (2002)
• Great Spy Movies (2001)
• Lisa Picard is Famous (2001)
• 28 Days (2000)
• Gun Shy (2000)
• Miss Congeniality (2000)
• Forces of Nature (1999)
• Hope Floats (1998)
• Practical Magic (1998)
• The Prince of Egypt (1998)
• Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)
• In Love and War (1996)
• A Time to Kill (1996)
• The Net (1995)
• Two if by Sea (1995)
• While You Were Sleeping (1995)
• Me and the Mob (1994)
• Speed (1994)
• Demolition Man (1993)
• The Thing Called Love (1993)
• The Vanishing (1993)
• Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993)
• Love Potion #9 (1992)
• Who Shot Pat? (1992)
• Fire on the Amazon (1991)
• When the Party's Over (1991)
• A Fool and His Money (1988)
• Hangmen (1987) |
