Sandra Bullock

Sandra Annette Bullock, born July 26, 1964, in Arlington, Virginia, to a German opera singer mother and a US Army contractor and voice teacher father, is one of the most commercially successful and critically respected actresses in Hollywood history, a performer of extraordinary warmth, comedic precision, and dramatic range who was the highest-paid actress in the world in 2010 and 2014, and who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Blind Side (2009), one of the most commercially successful biographical dramas ever made. Growing up in Nuremberg, Germany, where her mother was performing and teaching opera, Bullock developed a strong German-American bicultural identity — she is fluent in German — and spent her summers in the American South, absorbing the Southern storytelling tradition that would later inform her dramatic range. She studied drama at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, before moving to New York, working as a cocktail waitress and landing small television and film roles. Her breakthrough came with the action thriller Speed (1994), in which she played the resourceful passenger Annie Porter opposite Keanu Reeves in a vehicle-action set piece that became one of the defining action films of the decade. A string of commercially successful comedies — While You Were Sleeping (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), Hope Floats (1998), Miss Congeniality (2000) and its sequel, Two Weeks Notice (2002) — established her as one of America's most beloved romantic comedy stars. Her dramatic range expanded dramatically with Crash (2004), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, The Blind Side (2009, her Oscar), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011), Gravity (2013, opposite George Clooney, for which she received her second Oscar nomination), and Bird Box (2018).