Sandra Bullock
Sandra Annette Bullock is an American actress and film producer. The world's highest-paid actress of 2010 and 2014, Bullock's filmography spans both comedy and drama, and her accolades include an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award. She was named one of Times 100 most influential people in the world in 2010.
After making her acting debut with a minor role in the thriller Hangmen, Bullock received early attention for her supporting role in the action film Demolition Man. Her breakthrough in the action thriller Speed led to leading roles in the romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping, and the dramas A Time to Kill and Hope Floats. She achieved further success in the following decades with the comedies Miss Congeniality, Two Weeks Notice, The Proposal, The Heat, Ocean's 8, and The Lost City ; the dramas Crash and The Unforgivable ; and the thrillers Premonition and Bird Box. For her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy in the biographical drama The Blind Side, Bullock won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was nominated for the same award for playing an astronaut stranded in space in the science fiction thriller Gravity, which is her highest-grossing live-action film.
In addition to acting, Bullock is the founder of the production company Fortis Films. She has produced some of the films in which she has starred, including Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous and All About Steve, and served as an executive producer on the ABC sitcom George Lopez, on which she made numerous appearances. Dubbed "America's sweetheart" by the media, Bullock was also named the Most Beautiful Woman by People magazine in 2015.
Early life and education
Bullock was born on July 26, 1964, in Arlington County, Virginia, to Helga Mathilde, an opera singer and voice teacher from Germany; and John Wilson Bullock, an Army employee and part-time voice coach from Birmingham, Alabama. Her father, who was in charge of the Army's Military Postal Service in Europe, was stationed in Nuremberg when he met her mother. Her parents married in Germany. Bullock's maternal grandfather was a German rocket scientist from Nuremberg. The family returned to Arlington, where her father worked with the Army Materiel Command before becoming a contractor for The Pentagon. Bullock has a younger sister, Gesine Bullock-Prado, who served as president of Bullock's production company Fortis Films.For 12 years, Bullock lived in Nuremberg, West Germany, and Vienna and Salzburg, Austria, and grew up speaking German. She had a Waldorf education in Nuremberg. As a child, while her mother went on European opera tours, Bullock usually stayed with her aunt Christl and cousin Susanne, the latter of whom later married politician Peter Ramsauer. Bullock studied ballet and vocal arts as a child and frequently accompanied her mother, taking small parts in her opera productions. In Nuremberg, she sang in the opera's children's choir. Bullock has a scar above her left eye which was caused by a fall into a creek when she was a child. While she maintains her American citizenship, she applied for German citizenship in 2009.
Bullock attended Washington-Lee High School, where she was a cheerleader and performed in school theater productions. After graduating in 1982, she attended East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, where she received a BFA in Drama in 1987. While at East Carolina, she performed in theater productions, including Peter Pan and Three Sisters. She then moved to Manhattan, New York, where she supported herself as a bartender, cocktail waitress, and coat checker while auditioning for roles.
Career
Early roles and breakthrough (1987–1995)
While in New York, Bullock took acting classes with Sanford Meisner. She appeared in several student films and later landed a role in an Off-Broadway play No Time Flat. Director Alan J. Levi was impressed by Bullock's performance and offered her a part in the made-for-television film Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. This led to her being cast in a series of small roles in several independent films, and in the lead role of the short-lived NBC television version of the film Working Girl. She went on to appear in several films, such as Love Potion No. 9, The Thing Called Love and Fire on the Amazon, before her supporting role in the sci-fi action film Demolition Man.In 1994, she played Annie Porter, a passenger eventually driving a bus that was rigged by a terrorist, in the smash-hit blockbuster Speed alongside Keanu Reeves. She was required to read for Speed to ensure that there was the right chemistry between her and Reeves. She recalls they had to do "all these really physical scenes together, rolling around on the floor and stuff." Speed received critical acclaim, with Rotten Tomatoes calling it a "terrific popcorn thriller outstanding performances from Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, and Sandra Bullock", and it grossed $350 million worldwide, and helped establish Bullock as a Hollywood actress. She won Best Actress at the 21st Saturn Awards, and Best Female Performance and Most Desirable Female at the 1995 MTV Movie Awards.
Bullock headlined the romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping as a lonely Chicago Transit Authority token collector who saves the life of a man. The film had a positive reception from critics, who felt that it was "assembled with such skill—and with such a charming performance from Sandra Bullock—that it gives formula a good name." She received her first nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical. The thriller The Net, starred Bullock as a computer programmer who stumbles upon a conspiracy that puts her life and the lives of those around her in great danger. Owen Gleiberman, writing for Entertainment Weekly, complimented her performance, saying, "Bullock pulls you into the movie. Her overripe smile and clear, imploring eyes are sometimes evocative of Julia Roberts". While You Were Sleeping and The Net made $182 million and $110.6 million, respectively.
Worldwide recognition (1996–2007)
In A Time to Kill, a legal drama based on John Grisham's 1989 novel of the same name, Bullock portrayed a member of the defense team in the trial for the murder of two men who raped a young girl, opposite Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey and Kevin Spacey. She received an MTV Movie Award nomination for Best Female Performance. She subsequently received $11 million for Speed 2: Cruise Control, which she agreed to star in for financial backing for her next project, Hope Floats. Unlike the original film, Speed 2 was a critical and commercial flop that she later disparaged. In Hope Floats, she starred as an unassuming housewife whose life is disrupted when her husband reveals his infidelity to her on a talk show. Critic James Berardinelli remarked that her "undisputed strength lies in a blend of light drama and comedy". That film was a commercial success, grossing $81.4 million worldwide.Bullock starred in the comedy Practical Magic alongside Nicole Kidman as two witch sisters who face a curse which threatens to prevent them ever finding lasting love. While the film opened atop the chart on its North American opening weekend, it flopped at the box office. That year, she voiced Miriam in the DreamWorks Animation film The Prince of Egypt and wrote, produced, and directed the short film Making Sandwiches. She next played a free-spirited drifter who begins to talk to a writer in the romantic comedy Forces of Nature, on which Boxoffice Magazine remarked: "The combination of Affleck's deadpan by-the-book persona with the spontaneity of Bullock's character sparks with convincing chemistry." Forces of Nature made $93 million worldwide. Bullock took on the role of an FBI agent who must go undercover as a beauty pageant contestant in the comedy Miss Congeniality, which became another financial success, with a global gross of $212 million. It earned her a second nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical. In 28 Days, a dramedy directed by Betty Thomas, Bullock starred as a newspaper columnist obliged to enter a rehabilitation program for alcoholism.
Bullock starred in the psychological thriller Murder by Numbers as a seasoned homicide detective. Roger Ebert awarded the film three stars out of a possible four, stating: "Bullock does a good job here of working against her natural likability, creating a character you'd like to like, and could like, if she weren't so sad, strange and turned in upon herself." She teamed up with Hugh Grant for the romantic comedy Two Weeks Notice, in which she starred as a lawyer who walks out on her boss. Liz Braun, of Jam! Movies, found Bullock and Grant to be "perfectly paired", stating: "The script allows the two actors to be at their comedic best, even though the film as a whole is amateurish in many ways". Two Weeks Notice made $199 million globally. That year, she was presented with the Raul Julia Award for Excellence for helping expand career openings for Hispanic talent in the media and entertainment industry as the executive producer of the sitcom George Lopez. She also made several appearances on the show as Accident Amy, an accident-prone employee at the factory Lopez's character manages.
As part of a large ensemble cast, Bullock played the wife of a district attorney in the drama Crash, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. She received positive reviews for her performance, with some critics suggesting that it was the best performance of her career to that point. For Crash, she received the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture along with the rest of the cast. She next received a $17.5 million salary for Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, which Roger Ebert called a "doubly unnecessary" sequel. She was a co-recipient of the 2005 Women in Film Crystal Award. In 2006, Bullock reunited with Keanu Reeves for the romantic drama The Lake House, although their characters were separated throughout the film and they were only on set together for two weeks during filming, and played Harper Lee in Infamous, a drama based on George Plimpton's 1997 book Truman Capote, alongside Toby Jones and Daniel Craig. The Lake House was a financial success, while Infamous received generally positive reviews. Bullock headlined the supernatural thriller Premonition as a housewife who experiences the days surrounding her husband's death in non-chronological order. Despite negative reviews, the film grossed $84.1 million worldwide.