Sarah Michelle Gellar

An only child raised on New York's Upper East Side by a divorced schoolteacher mother, Gellar (pronounced Gell-are) was a natural-born ham. At the tender age of three-and-a-half she was spotted by an agent while dining at a restaurant with her mother. Within a matter of weeks, she had landed her first sizeable role, playing Valerie Harper's daughter in the 1983 TV movie An Invasion of Privacy. Four wasn't too young for the precocious tot to experience some of the more unpleasant realities of the biz. Her first commercial, in which she acted as a pint-sized Burger King shill who chides McDonalds for serving such skimpy patties, resulted in a now-famous disparagement lawsuit against her employers dubbed "The Battle of the Burgers." (The case was eventually settled out of court in 1982.) Luckily, her involvement in the beefy contretemps didn't break her short stride in the slightest. Subsequent appearances in some 100 commercials filmed over the ensung years brought in healthy residuals, and a handful of larger roles in the features Over the Brooklyn Bridge (1984), Funny Farm (1988), and High Stakes (1989); in the TV series Spenser: For Hire (1986); and in a Circle in the Square production of Horton Foote's The Widow Claire — honed her thespian's skills. In order to better balance her need to acquire an education with the demands of her budding career, Gellar attended New York's famous Professional Children's High School; she somehow also found time to excel as a competitive figure skater.

At 14, Gellar won her first stand-out role, a portrayal of young Jacqueline Bouvier in the 1991 NBC miniseries A Woman Named Jackie. The following year found her in the lead role of the syndicated series Swan's Crossing, and in a promising part in the Neil Simon Broadway hopeful Jake's Women (the production never made it to the Great White Way). The year 1993 delivered up Gellar's first solid, adult role, that of Erica Kane's long-lost, 22-year-old bad-seed daughter, Kendall Hart, on the daytime drama All My Children. Playing the scheming offspring of soap operadom's most notorious schemer gave Gellar opportunities to visit all manner of atrocities upon the unsuspecting denizens of Pine Valley: she used her devious wiles to attempt the seduction of her stepfather; she masterminded the breakup of one of her mother's numerous marriages; she faked a pregnancy; she shot people; she attempted suicide; she fell into a coma. Her first-rate villainy was rewarded in 1994 with an Emmy for Outstanding Younger Actress. Gellar departed the soap shortly after snagging the coveted award, and headed for the greener pastures of California to pursue work in television and film.

In 1996, the bombshell soap vet was chosen to play the title role of the action-packed splatter series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a mid-season replacement based on creator Joss Whedon's script for the moderately popular 1992 feature of the same title that starred Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry. (No stranger to the action genre, Whedon has also written or co-written scripts for Speed, Waterworld, Toy Story, Twister, and, more recently, Alien Resurrection.) The series positions the 20-something Gellar as a not-so-typical teen who is compelled by destiny to act as this century's one and only "slayer." In this unenviable capacity, she must use her considerable supernatural endowments to rid the streets of her "one-Starbucks town," Sunnydale, California, of any undead nasties who emerge at night from the portal to hell located rather inconveniently beneath her high school. As if that weren't enough, Buffy must simultaneously endure the typical suburbanite teen's no-less horrifying adolescent traumas by day, she's a clique-skewering wit, by night, a scantily clad, high-kicking, stake-wielding, vampire-slaying badass.

In its second season, Buffy reigned as the highest-ranking offering from the WB, and achieved cult-favorite status in a surprisingly short span of time; as for its star, she has commanded uniformly favorable critical attention for her deft physicality and comic flair. The show's popularity has had the attendant benefit of expanding Gellar's big-screen options. The petite ingenue, who has been in front of cameras most of her life, appeared in two 1997 thrillers: she played a small-town beauty queen with a damning secret in I Know What You Did Last Summer, co-starring alongside Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Jennifer Love Hewitt; and she played a sorority girl who meets a grisly demise in the sequel to Wes Craven's phenomenally popular 1996 horror flick Scream. 1999 witnessed her starring turn in the cloying romantic comedy Simply Irresistible, in which she sketches a Manhattan restaurateur who is inspired by her love for a department store executive to create culinary magic; and Cruel Intentions, a trashy teen adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

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