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Favorites:
Movie: The Princess
Bride, Actor: Tom Cruise, Actress:Stockard Channing Book:
Gone With the Wind, Color: Red, Season: Summer, Hobbies:
Rollerblading.Scuba Diving.Ice Skating, Music: Billy
Joel
The 5' 3," sandy blonde-haired Gen-Y icon Sarah Michelle Gellar's life
story reads like a preteen wish fulfillment fantasy. Born in Manhattan
in 1977 and discovered by an agent in a Manhattan restaurant at the age
of four, Gellar signed for her first role (in the 1983 telemovie An
Invasion of Privacy) not one week later. A plethora of bit parts in
television series (Spenser:
For Hire) and theatrical films (Over
the Brooklyn Bridge, 1984; Funny Farm,
1988; High
Stakes, 1989) followed, before Gellar landed a recurring role, in
the early '90s, on the decades-long daytime soap opera All
My Children. Throughout the early years of her career, Gellar was
managed and supervised by her mother, a former nursery school teacher
who insisted on straight A's as a prerequisite of an acting career.
Sarah Michelle delivered, time and again.
Despite the apparent fairy tale-like quality of her rise, Gellar
reportedly battled several decidedly unhappy experiences as a child,
including a parental divorce, decades of estrangement from her father,
and social struggles in a New York City high school, experiences
parlayed into her first (and most infamous) lead: that of Buffy, a
California valley girl high school student-turned-"exterminator of the
undead" in the early-'90s syndicated cult fantasy series Buffy
the Vampire Slayer. Gellar inherited the role from Kristy
Swanson, who fleshed it out in the (decidedly more comic) 1992
theatrical release of the same name. Under Gellar's aegis, the show
lasted seven years, from 1996 through 2003, and it became a massive
international hit, garnering legions of fans. The subject matter of the
series required the young actress to engage in rigorous exercise and
physical training off-camera throughout Buffy's
run.
Gellar (a compulsive shopper and brand aficionado off-camera) then
signed as a Maybelline spokeswoman and prepared to move into the third
phase of her acting career. As Buffy
wrapped, it coincided with the resurgence of American teen horror films
led by Wes
Craven's Scream
series, and although Gellar did not join the cast of the first
installment, her popularity on Buffy
the Vampire Slayer thematically paved the way for involvement in
one Scream
sequel and one emulator: Scream 2 and I
Know What You Did Last Summer (both 1997). In 1999, Gellar teamed
up with two other notables of the same generation, Reese
Witherspoon and Ryan
Phillippe, for the Dangerous
Liaisons teen update Cruel
Intentions. As Kathryn Merteuil -- the depraved schemer who coaxes
her stepbrother (Phillippe)
into deflowering the school headmaster's daughter (Witherspoon),
and thus inadvertently sets in motion a chain of disasters that will
destroy them all -- Gellar played off of her wholesome, "all-American
girl" image and helped turn the picture into a minor hit.
Meanwhile, Gellar met and fell in love with Hollywood heartthrob Freddie
Prinze Jr. (the son of the ill-fated, late-'70s Hispanic comedian Freddie
Prinze), and the two married in Mexico in 2002, the same year they
co-starred as Fred and Daphne for director Raja
Gosnell in the live-action summer blockbuster Scooby-Doo.
Two years later, Gellar and Prinze
took the wheel of the Mystery Machine to fight a mischievous specter in
2004's Scooby-Doo
2: Monsters Unleashed. Gellar (long a student and admirer of
Japanese culture) then traveled to Japan to do battle with some truly
frightening entities in the 2004 J-horror remake The Grudge.
In that effort, she plays an American student employed at a Japanese
health center who uncovers a centuries-old curse that feeds off of anger
and guides one victim after another into an unquenchable, violent rage.
Subsequent vocal work on the animated cult hit Robot
Chicken found the former vampire slayer having a bit of
behind-the-scenes fun without the stress of appearing before the camera,
and a role as an ambitious porn star teetering on the edge of the
apocalypse in director Richard
Kelly's eagerly anticipated Donnie Darko
follow-up, Southland
Tales, preceded a trip back into terror as a successful business
woman haunted by a decades-old murder in the 2006 supernatural thriller The Return.
In that picture, Gellar plays Joanna Mills, a thick-skinned, courageous
Midwestern girl plagued by haunting supernatural visions, who attempts
to uncover the origin of these specters. Unfortunately, that film opened
to horrendous critical reviews and lackluster box office numbers in
November 2006, appearing and disappearing quickly.
Gellar provided the voice of Ella (a riff on Cinderella) for the
family-friendly CG-animated fairy tale Happily
N'Ever After, alongside Prinze
and such actors as Sigourney
Weaver, Patrick
Warburton, Andy Dick,
and George
Carlin, but it, too, opened to dismal box office and poor critical
response, in January 2007. Meanwhile, she appeared as the voice of April
in the Weinstein-produced, CG-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles , the romantic comedy The Girls'
Guide to Hunting and Fishing (as a Big Apple book editor who leaves
her college beau for a much older romantic player), and the supernatural
thriller Addicted,
as a woman whose husband and brother-in-law both fall into comas, then
regain consciousness and begin to behave strangely. In 2009, Gellar and Prinze
announced they were expecting a child that fall. ~ Nathan Southern, All
Movie Guide
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