Sarah Michelle Gellar is an American actress and entrepreneur, born in New York City, NY, Sarah started her acting career very young. Her acting debut took off in the made-for-TV movie An Invasion of Privacy. Her television breakthrough came in 1993, when she originated the role of Kendall Hart on the ABC daytime soap opera All My Children.
Perhaps Sarah is best recognized from her main role as Buffy Summers on Buffy The Vampire Slayer between 1997 and 2003 for seven full seasons. The television show earned Sarah her five Teen Choice Awards, a Saturn Award and a Golden Globe Award nomination. The character was widely popular during the airing of the show and became known as one of the greatest female characters in US television. As much as Sarah was recognized for her TV role, her movie roles started to kick off – both the 1997 film I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2, and shortly after, in 1999 her role of Kathryn Merteuil in Cruel Intentions. Sarah then appeared as Daphne Blake in Scooby-Doo in 2002, which ended up becoming her biggest live action commercial success. Her role in Scooby-Doo was reprised for a sequel in 2004. Sarah’s role as Karen Davis in the horror film The Grudge came out in 2004 as well and its sequel together grossed more than $180 million dollars worldwide.
Ultimately, Sarah starred in numerous smaller scale films, such as The Return in 2006 and Southland Tales in 2007, and provided her voice for TMNT that same year. Her later film credits include The Air I Breathe in 2008, Possession and Veronika Decides to Die, both in 2009. Some years after all the successful movie roles, Sarah headlined the television series Ringer between 2011 and 2012 that ended after only one season, and shortly after, The Crazy Ones from 2013 to 2014 that co-starred Robin Williams.
In 2015, Sarah co-founded Foodstirs with Galit Laibow and Greg Fleishman. It is a food crafting brand and e-commerce startup selling baking kits. On April 18 of 2017, Sarah released a cookbook, “Stirring Up with Food”. The book was co-authored by Gia Russo, and features numerous food crafting ideas.
EARLY LIFE
Sarah is the only child of Rosellen (née Greenfield), a nursery school teacher, and Arthur Gellar, a garment worker. Both of her parents were Jewish. At the age of four, she was spotted by an agent in a restaurant in Upper Manhattan, and auditioned for a part in the television film An Invasion of Privacy, that aired i 1983. Sarah subsequently appeared in a controversial television commercial for Burger King.
In 1984, when Sarah was seven, her parents divorced and she was raised by her mother on the city’s Upper East Side. Sarah ended up losing contact with her father, from whom she remained estranged until his death in 2001. As a child, Sarah was a competitive figure skater, scoring third place at a New York State regional competition and placed fourth at a Tae Kwon Do competition at Madison Square Garden (she was a black belt).
During the 1980s, Sarah did play minor roles in the films Over the Brooklyn Bridge in 1984, Funny Farm in 1988 and High Stakes in 1989, and also guest starred in various television series, such as Spenser: For Hire and Crossbow. At the age of nine, she appeared alongside Matthew Broderick and Eric Stoltz in the Broadway production The Widow Claire. Sarah served briefly as a co-host of the teen girl talk show Girl Talk that aired in 1989.
Sarah was given a partial scholarship to study at the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, as her mother struggled with the tuition bills, and later, Sarah briefly attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, but dropped out due to acting obligations. Sarah graduated from the Professional Children’s School in 1994 as a ‘straight A’ student with a 4.0 grade average. While Sarah was spending time working on All My Children while “trying to graduate”, most of her senior year was completed through guided study.
MARRIED LIFE
Sarah met her husband Freddie Prinze, Jr., while they were filming the 1997 teen horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer, but the two did not start dating until 2000. They were engaged in April of 2001 and married in Mexico on September 1, 2002. Prinze and Gellar have worked together several times; they played each other’s respective love interests as Fred and Daphne in the Scooby-Doo films and both provided their voices for the animated feature Happily N’Ever After in 2007, and the animated series Star Wars Rebels.
In 2007, in honor of their fifth year of marriage, Sarah legally changed her name to Sarah Michelle Prinze. The couple have two children together, a daughter, Charlotte Grace (born September 2009) and a son, Rocky James (born September 2012).