TYes, Sandra was the girl we wanted to be when we grew up, even before she herself had grown up. Now she's in her 40s, still smoking hot and busy becoming a box office mogul by seducing Ryan Reynolds on screen ... who happens to be 13 years younger than Bullock.
Sandra is one of the great comediennes redefining what it means to be a grown-up actress. She has won awards, suffered heartache, become a mother and, oh, did we mention hooking up with Ryan Reynolds? And her career is only getting better with age, something that isn't often true of all actresses. Sandra is one of a handful of women managing to have the kind of careers that used to be reserved for leading men.
Okay, so I'm sure there is some judiciously deployed botox involved in Sandra's career success formula because she doesn't look all that different than she did when she was spending her summers keeping buses from going under 60 miles per hour. Either that or she's secretly a cyborg, which wouldn't necessarily make her less cool. I've got nothing against robots. But my money is still on well-placed botox. (Don't you kind of miss the days when injecting yourself with small amounts of poisonous toxins seemed like something only a bond villainess would do?)Whatever it is Sandra's doing for herself, botox, magic spells, robotics, unicorn tears ... it's working. She doesn't look plastic, and she doesn't seem to be trying to pretend she's still 22 (except for that All About Steve thing that I refuse to call a movie, but every comediva is entitled to a swing and a miss occasionally).
Sandra Bullock started performing young; her mother, Helga D. Meyer, was an opera singer who her father, John Bullock, met while stationed in Nuremberg, Germany. Helga followed John back to Arlington, Virginia, where Sandra grew up, but she still toured Europe frequently, taking her young daughter along for the ride. Sandra took small parts in many of her mother's operas, learning German and ballet in order to perform children's roles. Obviously, the acting bug stuck because Sandra dropped out of
college in 1986, just three credits short of graduation, to become an actress. The rest, as they say, is history!So what can we learn from dear Sandra? I think anyone who has watched her wild ride through the tabloids in the last year can answer that question. It's dignity, comedivas. And not the sort of solemn, stoic dignity that comes with hiding your emotions. The sort of dignity that shines through sadness and makes other people feel your joy so deeply that they want to share in it on a movie screen. Being a funny lady doesn't mean you can't be a powerful woman at the same time, and I just hope Sandra Bullock keeps on proving it to us as she, and her career, continue to mature!
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