British Vogue (October 96)

For a moment everything went tilt, as if I had just entered some loopy all-American pinball machine. I was supposed to be stepping inside Sandra Bullock's trailer on the back lot at Shepperton Studios; what I found was a Red Cross nurse in ankle-length pinafore, high laced boots, hair in a huge bun topped with a white cap, and some skinny, preppy/surfer dude, the two of them slurping pasta out of tin foil takeaway cartons, chattering away about go-kart racing. Who were these people?Currently earning more than $10 million per picture, Sandra Bullock has officially eclipsed Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, and Bridgette Fonda in the race to be Hollywood's favorite girl-next-door. She has attained this exalted position via a relatively few successful films: the runaway-bus-bomb action thriller Speed;the meet-cute coma comedy/romance While You Were Sleeping; the silicon-thin techno-thriller The Net; and, most recently, the emotion choked John Grisham-inspired Mississippi courtroom saga, A Time To Kill. If we listen to the L.A players, the studio executives who sign the eight-figure checks, Sandra Bullock has reached this summit of her profesion not because of her glamour, her brilliant acting talent or her sex appeal. Rather, because of what they call her "accessibility". Translated, this means audiences worldwide can immediately relate to Bullock's relaxed, attractive, humorous manner, to a non-threatening screen image that comes across as very "real", despite the fact that- in reality- Sandra Bullock is now a Box Office Goddess.

"Hey, you want some pasta?" the nurse asked me. "Sure, we've got plenty," chimed in the preppy/surfer dude. When I declined, both shrugged and continued to babble in manic slang laced with some suburban brotherly-sisterly teasing. Then the nurse rose to raid the fridge for a tub of Haagen-Daaz chocolate fudge, while the preppy/surfer continued to scrape the tinfoil cartons clean, while I gradually found my bearings. Of course. The nurse was Sandra Bullock. So the preppy-surfer dude must be Chris O'Donnell. Together they were making In Love and War, the Richard Attenborough-directed film about the true love story behind Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms.Accesible? These two seemed as handy as a couple of Kleenex. So what if there was suddenly a journalist inserted into their luchtime trailer glee? Sandy and Chris were having such a terrific time here, they were such good buddies (but obviously not lovers) just because he's here now, why be difficult? Let the happy lunch hour roll. So I sat down and waited and, eventually, after more jokes, more ice cream, more chatter, after Chris trotted over to his own trailer to fetch a couple of Dime bars for Sandy ("No, no! I just want one!"), after Chris took his leave, Sandy sat herself down right beside me."The greatest thing about Chris is that he has no brain sieve," she says once Chris is out of the door. "He doesn't know the meaning of curbing what he says. That's why I adore him. But it can be painful." And of course while this is a delightful insight into Chris, I am more concerned about Sandra's own brain sieve, hoping that it is also missing today so that I can fill my tape recorder with several hours of fresh, unadulterated Bullockisms.I am not dissapointed.

Sandra Bullock quickly proves to be forthcoming, intelligent and very good company. She is also suprisingly- refreshingly- different from a number of talented actresses I have interviewed. Off-camera and out-of-role, these actresses have seemed to exist only as empty vessels, waiting for the next role to fill them with motivation, lines, actions, gestures, contexts. Unlike the Jennifer Jason Leigh's and Miranda Richardsons (brilliant actresses though they may be), Sandra Bullock is not gloomy, troubled or ethereal, just really really- REAL- that word again. She has enough personality to fill an entire fan magazine and a manner of speaking her mind that seems to be based on her own experience. Although she talks in a somewhat haphazard American cascade of words, what she says reveals a self-awareness and a modesty that surely explains why so many people find her so believable on-screen.Moreover, Sandra Bullock is that rare creature: an actress who actually looks the same off-screen (once you get past the Red Cross nurse costume, that is).Her bewitching, luminous dark eyes, large sensual mouth, Italianate nose and small-busted, long-legged dancer's body combine to make her.........OK, not a classic beauty, but a highly attractive woman in her early thirties; someone men wouldn't be afraid to approach at a party or even to find sitting across a conference table."I was an absolute outcast for the first years I was back in the States. There was something seriously wrong with me." Luchtime frolics behind us, Sandra Bullock is describing the seismic event of her adolescence.

Aged 12, after a childhood of being shuttled between Europe and America, from theatre to theatre, temporary home to temporary home, by her parents- a Bavarian mother who sang opera professionally, an American father who was both a voice coach and a businessman- she was settled in a Virginia suburb just outside Washington D.C."For two years I had no friends," she says. "No. I had one friend. This great African-American guy with bleached blond hair named Tracy, my ally. But everything else was incredibly nasty. I'd go to my mother and say, 'Today I had my head cracked into a locker,' but she wouldn't understand. 'Why would little kids do that to my daughter?' she's ask. Mom didn't realize you didn't have to have a reason." Her difficulties coping with the bullying cliques of Junior High were compounded by her mother's insensitivity to the peer-group pressure on a pubescent American teenager to wear the right labels- and by Sandra's own academic talents. She had been a straight A student in German schools. "The only way I could conform in America was to not be smart. I did well in classes until I saw that it was another thing against me, then my grades were horrible."

At 14, she reinvented herself. "I got a job cleaning in this insurance company and worked after school to earn my money so I could buy clothes. I decided, OK, I will conform. Not because I wanted to be like them, but because I wanted to beat them at their own game. I became incredibly ordinary. Everything I owned was monogrammed." A talented gymnast, she stopped taking drama and dance classes and was even taken on by the cheerleader squad. The rewards were immediate and, characteristically, they made her uncomfortable. "Everybody who had never spoken to me before was suddenly a really good friend of mine. It was sad." Having won the acceptance of her highschool classmates, "Suddenly I woke up. So I just started rebelling again. I had turned into this cookie-cutter uniform. But then I got back into drama." In her case, "rebellion" didn't mean hard drugs or pierced eyebrows, but an arduous creative struggle, which began in the drama department at East Carolina University, an educational backwater she stubbornly chose against her parents' wishes. They wanted her to attend Juilliard, her father's alma mater in New York, "but I knew I just wasn't ready for that."

Prior to graduation, she went to New York anyway, sharing a tiny flat with her father (who was a part-time voice coach in the city), working at a sleazy Times Square bar and making the audition rounds. After some good reviews in several off-Broadway plays, she went to Los Angeles, but she was far from an overnight success. Neither a classic beauty nor a bombshell bimbo, she spent years perfecting her craft in forgettable movies like When the Party's Over, The Thing Called Love, The Vanishing, Love Potion No. 9 and several television series.Her first real break came with a part in the mega-budget Stallone action vehicle Demolition Man, which happily bombed but led, via contacts made on the production, to the lead opposite Keanu Reeves in Speed. This smash box office hit catapulted her towards the front rank of bankable young Hollywood actresses. While You Were Sleeping confirmed her arrival. With her new "overnight" success came international fame, multi-million-dollar contracts and something else, something Bullock mentions frequently. Pressure. As hit film followed hit film, she says, "It started getting to that point where you feel people placing you on the next rung and I didn't want to be there because the pressure is that much greater.She is emphatic about the relief she felt when Two If By Sea, a film written by her friend Denis Leary, imploded upon release. "The best thing that happened was that I completely stank and it was horrible." Although she blames the studio execs for messing up Leary's original version, she welcomed the aftermath because the pressure on her to keep surpassing Hollywood's expectations was finally relieved. "It was a breath of fresh air."

But the recent American critical and box office success of A Time To Kill - in which she plays an intelligent, sexy, ambitious liberal law clerk down in Mississippi from the North, but without turning into a caricature of politically correct Nineties woman - can only increase the professional pressure she feels in future. "It was a challenge. A new departure for me." Although the film comes perilously close to sensationalism, with a profusion of melodramatic violent action scenes, it also speaks more frankly and more shrewdly about the current state of black/white racial tension in the United States than any other Hollywood film has done for decades. Bullock is grateful to Joel Schumacher, the film's director, for allowing her this heavyweight dramatic oppurtunity and she speaks in awed tones of her fellow cast, particularly Matthew McConaughey ("He's not just really pretty, but so gifted; we just watched him explode") and Kevin Spacey ("He's my God and my idol").

When she is not on a film set, Bullock's Los Angeles life revolves around her close-knit family, including her younger sister Gesine, and a group of loyal long-time friends, some of whom work for her production company, Fortis Films, which her father John now manages. Her love life at the moment is a carefully guarded secret, although there have been tabloid items trying to link her to fellow stars like McConaughey and O'Donnell. The truth is more mundane; she spent four years in a relationship with actor Tate Donovan whom she met while filming Love Potion No. 9. When they broke up, she took a year to recover, perhaps reflected in her bittersweet performance in While You Were Sleeping, shot during this time. Her next relationship was with Don Padilla, a grip on the film crew of The Net. That ended last spring, apparently fallen victim to the pressure of her ascension to Goddess status.

For a movie star, Bullock is candid about her weight problems. She has afigure that changes dramatically depending on her diet. Denied junk food by her strict German mother as a child, today she has to make a real effort to keep off the Haagen-Daaz and Dime bars. And this in turn affects one of her favorite off-screen pastimes: fashion."I'm obsessed with it, but I think I'm a little too fearless. I've made a lot of public fashion faux pas." Laughing, she recounts the sad story of a pink Calvin Klein dress she acquired during one of her "chunky" phases. "We call this the Pink Walrus episode. Having poured myself into it, I made the mistake of wearing it out in public. Now all the photographs show me in all my shiny pink fatness.""I'm not a label queen," she claims, and she loves to cruise the backstreets and the flea markets in search of new looks. Most recently, having been deprived of fashion magazines for months, she has discovered the new Gucci, a label she previously identified with her odious preppy days in high school. She has bought Gucci loafers for a number of the Shepperton film crew, including her studio bodyguard and her driver. And for herself: "I found the most insane pair. Silver sparkly ones. And a Dolce and Gabbana sweater to go with them." She giggles. Fashion has to have a sense of humor.So, too, does a $10 million Box Office Goddess if she is going to survive all the pressures Hollywood can bring to bear on an accesible young woman. With her sense of humor clearly intact, Sandra Bullock appears to remain the actress with whom we'd all love to share a garden wall.

© 1996 by British Vogue