Going through the highlights of Sandra Bullock’s life is no easy task. The actress turns 60 this Friday and her strict discretion and introversion have made her, in her four decades of career, a complete unknown even to her most ardent fans. Few actresses (if any) deserve paychecks close to 15 million dollars per film, and who have led the list of the best actresses on several occasions. highest paid in cinema in the magazine Forbes, They can afford the chosen anonymity that the performer has enjoyed.
In her private life she may be different: “Everyone says that I am noisy, and that I like to get involved in other people’s lives, but… well yes, I think I am just like that,” she confessed during an interview for the American magazine Wired last 2023. For the public, she has no social media profile, she doesn’t show up at international fashion weeks, she’s not the target of publicists, and even less so of paparazzi. In fact, one of the only times she’s made headlines in the tabloids was with her devastating divorce from Jesse James in 2010: “Married to a monster”; “The worst day of Sandra’s life”; “Explosive confrontation.” But she has a very clear conscience about that.
Although the weight of fame has not allowed her to do so entirely, this mania for going unnoticed may have come from childhood. Sandra Bullock always had a deep passion for acting. Her father, an opera teacher, travelled all over Europe with his wife and two daughters. Little Bullock never had stage fright. At the age of five she was already singing for one of the choirs that her father trained. She studied music and dance while visiting the most important classical theatres of the Old Continent. But it was not enough and she ended up graduating in Performing Arts upon her return to Washington D.C., her hometown. During her puberty years, and as she has shared in some interviews, her mother was not especially benevolent: “My mother was very strict. She did not let me go out with boys until I was 18. No dates, no being in a car with them. She only let me go on two occasions and she called me every 20 minutes,” she said during an interview in 2013. Perhaps this explains her introverted character.
After making her first forays into film with small roles in the late 1980s (she replaced Lori Petty as Sylvester Stallone’s partner in the action film Demolition Man), rose to fame with Speed: Maximum Power in 1994, considered one of the best action films in the history of cinema, directed by Keanu Reeves, with whom she still maintains a close and enduring friendship. “Before I die, before I leave this planet, I am convinced that Keanu and I need to do something more in front of a camera. Even if we are in wheelchairs or with walkers. Or on scooters at Disneyland,” said the actress on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the global success. The film grossed 350 million dollars (322 million euros in current conversions), and placed Bullock as one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood.
Despite this great success, Bullock herself has confessed that the role she liked least to play was the one in the second part of the film, Speed 2: Cruise Controlreleased in 1997, just three years after the first installment: “There is a film that still embarrasses me, Speed 2. I’ve always been very honest about it. It doesn’t make sense! A very slow boat moving very slowly towards an island? I wish I hadn’t made that movie.” The Oscar winner is not alone in this. Speed 2 It is universally considered one of the worst action films ever made, and was accompanied by savagery and box office failure (perhaps fueled by the absence of Keanu Reeves). When a reporter explained that he liked it, Bullock asked humorously: “Were you on drugs?” “I was 12,” the reporter said. “There you have it,” the actress concluded.
This sarcastic character is typical of the actress. Her unconscious spontaneity has led her into some trouble, but for the most part, it has served to transmit confidence and sincerity. Bullock publicly warned her directors and producers not to count on her to make a musical: “I will not act in a musical. I’m not a singer. People don’t want to see me in a musical. I hate them. I know my limits.” She has also confessed that she hates acting in romantic comedies, despite being the lead in some very successful ones, such as the well-known Love with notice (2002), in which she plays the lawyer of the most annoying businessman in the entire American continent (Hugh Grant); or The Proposition (2009), alongside Ryan Reynolds, which was also a hit in theaters. “I don’t like comedies, I like action,” she said in an interview with Efe in 2009, when she came to Spain to promote this latest film. Curiously, in the same interview she also revealed that she “hates” Penelópe Cruz: “How can you be so beautiful and such a good actress?” she joked.
This boldness and self-confidence led the actress to be one of the pioneers in denouncing sexism in the industry long before the #MeToo movement gained popularity among the public, even considering giving up her career. “I had a birth in which I realized that I was treated badly just for having a vagina,” she lamented on one occasion.
Many critics agree that Hollywood has not always treated one of its most versatile actresses well. In 2010, she won an Oscar for A possible dream (2009), but she did not like it. That same year, she competed with renowned actors such as Meryl Streep or Helen Mirren, but the actress has never felt deserving of the award. In one of her displays of honesty, she went so far as to declare that she did not feel worthy of the statuette she won: “So I thought, I am going to spend the rest of my life making myself worthy of it,” she confessed. In 2013, she returned to the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, this time nominated for Gravityher best film according to critics. All eyes were fixed on the actress, but in the end it remained a simple desire. For her, however, the film meant a personal and professional rebirth: “It’s not because of the type of roles that can come, but because of something more personal. With Gravity “My desire to make films has been reborn,” he revealed in conversation with this newspaper in 2013.
A stormy love life
Sandra Bullock is known as one of the queens of romantic comedies, but her love life bears little resemblance to one of these films. In recent decades, her life has been marked by adversity and new developments. She has divorced, become a mother, and her last boyfriend, photographer Bryan Randall, died of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) a year ago. In 2005, she married businessman Jesse James, with whom she waited more than four years to adopt her son Louis. The actress decided to keep it a secret until after the 2010 Oscars, when she won the statuette. Then her life completely fell apart. She dedicated the award to her fellow nominees, but also to her parents for “having trained her to be an artist,” and to her husband, with whom she had been married for five years at the time.
Weeks later, she announced her debut as a mother at 50, but also her divorce. Fate wanted that just at that moment the scandal of her husband and his alleged infidelities exploded through an interview given by one of James’ lovers, the model Michelle McGee (the first of many). She has confessed that it was a very hard grieving process for her: “I didn’t know how to process the pain without hurting my newborn son. Even though they are small, they take on all the pain. So my obligation was to give him all my attention and not stain the first year of his life with pain,” the actress confessed a year ago in an interview. for the American television channel CBS. It can’t have helped that the man she had chosen as her partner excused himself by saying that “infidelity is just a part of life.” The divorce was long and devastating to Bullock’s mental health.
America’s sweetheart decided on her own to step away from the cinema and focus on her two adopted children (Louis, in 2010; and Laila, in 2015). “I don’t want to feel the way I feel now when I’m in front of a camera. I just want to be at home,” she also confirmed in the interview with CBS: “And I don’t know how long that will be. I don’t owe anything to any producer. I would just love to clean out my basement. I don’t want to work just to fill a void.” In the last decade she has made some notable films. In 2018, her success Blindly It became Netflix’s most-watched film for three years, an absolute achievement in the era of streaming. Despite constantly disappearing from the map, her films continue to be huge hits in cinemas around the world. Maybe that’s why: because the only way to meet Bullock again is by paying for a cinema ticket.
Even so, the actress is sometimes her own worst enemy: “I am my own worst critic, I never like anything I do.” Critics praise her en masse, especially for her versatility in front of the camera: “When someone asks me if I want to see a Liam Neeson film or a Jennifer Aniston film, I know what I am going to find. But that is not the case with her. If they ask me if I want to see a Sandra Bullock film, the only thing I know is that Sandra Bullock will be in it,” explains Shea Serrano, film critic for the American daily The New York Times in The Ringer.
No film lover doubts the abilities that Sanda Bullock possesses as an actress or as a mother, always concerned about the privacy and honor of her children: “It’s scary to think that when your beautiful son grows up and becomes a man, someone is not going to treat him the way you treat him simply because of the color of his skin. It breaks my heart,” she revealed in an interview for Jada Pinkett Smith’s show, Red Table Talk, in December 2021. She has always been well regarded as a partner as well. In the late nineties she had a four-year relationship with Matthew McConaughey. A few years later, she had a relationship of more than a year with Ryan Gosling after meeting on the set of Murder…1-2-3Gosling, 16 years younger, said he has had “two of the best girlfriends in the world” – referring to Bullock and Rachel McAdams. He hasn’t yet I have never met anyone who can reach them,” he confessed.
