On the Move: Sandra Bullock

Garth Pearce - January 21, 2007

Sandra Annette Bullock was born to a German opera singer mother and voice coach father in Arlington County, Virginia, in 1964. She spent much of her early childhood in Europe and is a fluent German speaker. Her movie breakthrough in Speed was followed by roles in Miss Congeniality and last year’s Oscar winner, Crash. She married Jesse James, a celebrity motorbike builder, in 2005.

Sandra Bullock looks crestfallen. She has given up her Porsche 911 Turbo and still can’t quite believe it. “It was,” she says, “my pride and joy.” And what does she have in its place in the long driveway of her country home on the edge of Austin, Texas? A Toyota Prius.

These hybrid petrol-electric — but otherwise unremarkable — family runarounds are all the rage among Hollywood stars. But for Bullock, 42, it was clearly a tough purchase. “My first car was a Honda Accord, plastered with Bob Marley stickers,” she says. “It took a long time to graduate to my beautiful baby Porsche. But I think it’s time to be more responsible.”

Since her breakthrough in Speed in 1994 (a role she was advised against taking because it was “a bus movie”), Bullock has been something of an action girl, both on and off screen. As well as burning rubber in her Porsche, she has been a regular in her local salsa clubs — “I dance for five or six hours” — and she once toiled for four months ripping out walls and tiling a Spanish-style house in Los Angeles.

In 2000 she survived the crash of a chartered jet at Jackson Hole airport, Wyoming, when the plane missed the runway. And when she found herself just 12 blocks from the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks in 2001, she went to a local hospital to help, relaying messages from patients to their loved ones on her Palm Pilot.

“I’ve always been pretty ballsy,” she says. “I make sure the oil is checked on the car and that the house is functioning properly. If something needs fixing I am more than likely to do it myself.”

It has not, she admits, always been a recipe for a smooth-running love life. There have been broken love affairs, scattered like wrecks in the desert. “I don’t even like to think about it,” she confides. “It was just too sad.”

That period ended in July 2005 when Bullock married Jesse James, a multi-tattooed biker, arriving in a red monster truck for the sunset ceremony on a Californian ranch. James, 37, whose great-great-grandfather was a cousin of the 19th-century outlaw, runs a company called West Coast Choppers.

“I never thought I’d get married,” says Bullock. “Let alone to a guy called Jesse James. I was having a perfectly good time doing what I was doing. People would ask, ‘When are you going to get married?’ and I would say, ‘What makes you think to get a complete life you must be married?’ ” Bullock changed her mind when she met James at his workshop in Long Beach, California, where he hand-builds motorbikes costing up to £75,000 each. “I went along because one of my godsons wanted to look at a bike,” she says. “And there was Jesse.”

Bullock, who was once engaged to the actor Tate Donovan and enjoyed a long relationship with Matthew McConaughey, earned a blast from Hollywood cynics who predicted the marriage would be over by Christmas — the Christmas before last. Jesse, who has three children and had been married twice before, was hardly a safe bet.

“I know a lot of people said it would soon be over,” says Bullock. “Those who know us — really know us — realise that is not going to be the case. It’s often work which ruins relationships in Hollywood. I’ve had a good rest and am not working so much. I had done nothing but work since college — from waitressing to acting.”

Bullock was born in Arlington, Virginia, daughter of Helga Meyer, a German opera singer, and John Bullock, a Pentagon contractor and part-time voice coach. Her maternal grandfather, from Nuremberg, Germany, worked as a rocket scientist. Bullock spent much of her early childhood in Nuremberg when not accompanying her mother on opera tours around Europe.

Aged 12, she moved back to the United States and was voted “most likely to brighten up your day” in her high school year book. She dropped out of East Carolina University to pursue her acting career (although she later completed her degree) and made her first notable film appearance in Demolition Man in 1993, followed a year later by Speed and then a string of romantic comedies including While You Were Sleeping, Two Weeks Notice and Miss Congeniality. “First I was action girl, then romantic comedy girl,” she says.

But Bullock’s career has take a different turn since her performance in the hard-hitting Oscar-winner Crash in 2004. She’s back in serious mood for Infamous, a film about the author Truman Capote, played by the British actor Toby Jones. Bullock plays Capote’s lifelong friend, Nelle Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

“It was a different role for me. I was playing someone who had really lived,” she says. “She smoked like crazy, had a specific style and look about her and an accent from Alabama. She had known Capote since they were kids. She was his protector when others tried to beat him up on the lawn at kindergarten.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone getting the better of Bullock. She even scoffs at her reputation for always being pleasant to work with. “I am not going to agree with everyone,” she says. “I’ve had some serious fights with people for creative reasons. It’s nothing personal. But if someone wants to make me do something that makes me look bad, then I fight.”

On her CD changer

I usually listen to my iPod. I’ve downloaded an eclectic mix of Euro, Asian and Latin fusion music. Oh, and of course, there’s always Bob Marley.

The Sunday Times