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Sarah Michelle Gellar

Born 1977-04-14 in New York City, NY
An Actor

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In Brief:

Sarah Michelle Gellar (born April 14, 1977) is an American actress perhaps best known for having played the title role of Buffy Anne Summers in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

She starred in horror films such as The Grudge (2004) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), in family films such as Scooby-Doo (2002), and in independent films such as Harvard Man (2001).

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Bio:

Gellar was born in New York City, the only child of Jewish American parents Arthur and Rosellen Gellar, a nursery school teacher. At the age of four, she was spotted by an agent in a restaurant in Uptown Manhattan. Two weeks later, she auditioned for a part in An Invasion Of Privacy, a TV movie starring Valerie Harper, Carol Kane and Jeff Daniels. At the audition, Gellar read both her own lines and those of Harper's, which impressed the directors enough to give her the role. A short while later, she got a part in a controversial commercial for Burger King, in which she criticized McDonald's and claimed to eat only at Burger King. This led to a lawsuit against Burger King, ad agency J. Walter Thompson, and Gellar herself, who appeared in court as a witness for the defense. The dispute was eventually settled out of court.

Gellar then continued to make commercials while having small parts in TV. In 1984, her parents divorced and she was brought up by her mother on the Upper East Side. She was estranged from her father from this time until his death from liver cancer on October 9, 2001.

Gellar attended New York's Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School. The same year she had her third TV role as Emily in an episode of the TV series Spenser: For Hire, starring Robert Urich. She had a small part in Chevy Chase's Funny Farm, and filmed in Europe for the TV series Crossbow, based on William Tell.

Gellar attended the Professional Children's School, which was also attended by Tara Reid, Macaulay Culkin, Rebecca Gayheart, and Jerry O'Connell, whom Gellar dated in 1998. Gellar held a straight-A average and became a competent figure skater.

Her ex-best friend was Melissa Joan Hart, who later was the star of the series Clarissa Explains It All and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.

Gellar had a role in the movie High Stakes opposite Sally Kirkland. In 1991, she played a young Jacqueline Bouvier in A Woman Named Jackie.

Gellar's major break came in 1992, when she starred in the teen soap opera Swan's Crossing, after which she starred in the soap opera All My Children, playing the conniving character Kendall Hart, the long-lost daughter of character Erica Kane (played by Susan Lucci). In 1995, at the age of 18, she won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Younger Leading Actress in a Drama Series.

Gellar left All My Children in 1995 and landed the lead in the 1997 TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon, as a teenager burdened with the responsibility of fighting a number of mystical foes, with the aid of a group of friends and her Watcher (a teacher of sorts). The show was well received by critics and audiences alike, spawned a spinoff series (Angel) and, throughout its seven seasons and a total of 144 episodes, Buffy, and Gellar along with her, became cult icons in the United States and the UK, particularly as archetypes of "empowered" women.

The steadiness and believability of Sarah's performance in the role of Buffy maintained a sense of reality in the series no matter how bizarre the plot developments. Another remarkable aspect of her performance as the maturing Buffy is that she was in reality four years older than the character she portrayed.

She has other acting facets that were not fully deployed until the beginning of her film work. An example is the flair for comedy she demonstrated as Daphne in the Scooby-Doo movies. She is viewed as being the most bankable in film production of any actor from the Buffy television series which is unsurprising as she played the starring role.

Gellar sang several of the songs during the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode "Once More, with Feeling", which spawned an original cast album.

Gellar has expressed dissatisfaction about certain aspects of Season 6 of Buffy and the finale in season 7. Not long after the series finale she said quite emphatically that she had no interest in appearing in a Buffy movie, although since then she has said she will consider it if the script is good enough. She did not appear in the final season of Angel, which left the show's creators straining to wrap up the long-running Buffy/Angel/Spike romantic triangle without actually showing Buffy during the episode. Gellar told the Sci Fi Channel's website she was willing to appear, but scheduling conflicts and family problems prevented it. She has declined to lend her voice to the various Buffy video games, and another actress voiced Buffy for the never-aired Buffy animated series.

Gellar has appeared on the covers of Cosmopolitan, Glamour, FHM, Rolling Stone, and dozens more. She was in some Got milk? ads, and is a model for Maybelline. She was featured on Maxim's Hot 100 list in 2002, 2003, and 2005, and in FHM's 100 Sexiest Women of 2005. In 1998, she was named one of People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People (in the World)."

With continued success on Buffy, she attempted to capitalize on her television fame to create a career for herself in motion pictures, with intermittent commercial success. After roles in the popular thrillers I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2 by Wes Craven, she starred in the film Simply Irresistible. This film featured a magical crab and borrowed heavily from Like Water for Chocolate.

Her next film was Cruel Intentions, a modern-day retelling of Les Liaisons Dangereuses; this movie included a lesbian kiss between Gellar and Selma Blair. The movie was a modest hit at the box office grossing over 38 million dollars in the U.S. Roger Ebert stated that in the film, Gellar and Ryan Philippe "develop a convincing emotional charge", and that Gellar is "effective as a bright girl who knows exactly how to use her act as a tramp". In 1999, she also appeared in the Stone Temple Pilots music video Sour Girl.

She then played a lead role in James Toback's critically unsuccessful Harvard Man (2001) which also bombed at the box office, followed by success as Daphne in Scooby-Doo (2002), a live-action adaptation of the cartoon series which earned over 275 million worldwide. Gellar also appeared in the movie's sequel, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004) which earned about half of the gross the original did and critics were even less impressed. She and husband Freddie have stated repeatedly they are not returning for anymore sequels and, thus far, the studio has no plans to continue the franchise as theatrical releases.

In 2004, David Wirtschafter, the president of the William Morris Agency, which represented Gellar, told The New Yorker that the success of Gellar's low-budget film The Grudge (a remake of the Japanese horror film Ju-on: The Grudge) "takes our client Sarah Michelle Gellar, who now is nothing at all, and . . . makes her a star, potentially. Suddenly, the Sarah Michelle Gellar space is meaningful". The remark led Gellar to terminate her association with the agency.

Gellar's most recent film role is in The Grudge 2, scheduled to open on October 13, 2006; in the film, Gellar has a minor role reprising her character from The Grudge. Gellar has another thriller, The Return, scheduled for November 10, 2006; she has also starred in several films that have yet to be released, including Southland Tales, The Air I Breathe and A Girl's Guide to Hunting And Fishing. Gellar will next star opposite Lee Pace in Addicted, a supernatural thriller based on the South Korean film Jungdok.

Gellar met husband Freddie Prinze, Jr. during filming of the 1997 teen horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer. They became engaged in April 2001 and on September 1, 2002 were married in Jalisco, Mexico. The nondenominational wedding was officiated by Adam Shankman, a choreographer Gellar had worked with on Buffy.

Gellar and Prinze have since starred together in the Scooby Doo films.

In 2004, while filming The Grudge in Japan, Gellar visited the famous Japanese swordsmith Shoji Yoshihara (Kuniie III) and bought a Samurai sword from him as a birthday present for her husband. Gellar realized that she needed clearance from the government to remove it from the country, and after eventually succeeding, she stated that it was "an incredibly difficult feat" to do.

Gellar is sometimes thought to be an atheist, but she has said in interviews that she believes in God but does not belong to an organised religion.

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Filmography:

• Addicted (2007)
• Alice (2007)
• The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing (2007)
• Happily N'Ever After (2007)
• The Air I Breathe (2007)
• Southland Tales (2007)
• The Return (2006)
• The Grudge 2 (2006)
• The Grudge (2004)
• Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004)
• Scooby-Doo (2002)
• Harvard Man (2001)
• Cruel Intentions (1999)
• Simply Irresistible (1999)
• She's All That (1999)
• Small Soldiers (1998)
• Scream 2 (1997)
• I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
• High Stakes (1989)
• Funny Farm (1988)
• Over the Brooklyn Bridge (1984)

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