Sarah Michelle Gellar

Sarah Michelle Prinze (née Gellar /ˈɡɛlər/ GHEL-ər; born April 14, 1977) is an American actress. She is known for portraying strong female characters in film and television, and is regarded as a scream queen for her work in the horror genre.

After being spotted by a talent agent as a child, Gellar began her career on television at age five. She obtained her first leading role in the syndicated teen drama series Swans Crossing (1992) and had her breakthrough as Kendall Hart on the ABC soap opera All My Children (1993–1995), for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award. She achieved international recognition for her portrayal of Buffy Summers on the WB/UPN supernatural series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), which earned her a Saturn Award and a nomination for a Golden Globe.

In film, Gellar has played leading and supporting roles in I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Scream 2 (1997), Cruel Intentions (1999), Scooby-Doo (2002), Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004), The Grudge (2004), Southland Tales (2006), and Do Revenge (2022). Her other television credits include Ringer (2011–2012), The Crazy Ones (2013–2014), Wolf Pack (2023), and Dexter: Original Sin (2024–2025).

As a voice actor, Gellar has appeared in the films Small Soldiers (1998) and TMNT (2007), the series Robot Chicken (2005–2018), Star Wars Rebels (2015–2016), and Masters of the Universe: Revelation (2021), and the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops (2011). In addition to acting, she co-founded Foodstirs, an e-commerce baking company that operated from 2015 to 2022, released the cookbook Stirring Up Fun with Food (2017), and served as a judge on Star Search (2026).

Gellar was born in New York City on April 14, 1977. She is the only child of Rosellen (née Greenfield), a nursery school teacher, and Arthur Gellar, a garment worker. Both of her parents are Jewish. In 1984, when she was seven, her parents divorced and she was raised by her mother on Manhattan's Upper East Side. While growing up, she lost contact with her father, from whom she remained estranged until his death in 2001. She once described him as "non-existent", and stated: "My father, you can just say, is not in the picture. I'm not being deliberately evasive about him, it's just that there's so little to say." Gellar was a competitive figure skater, once finishing in third place at a New York State regional competition, and obtained a black belt in taekwondo.

With her single mother working "just above the poverty line", Gellar received a partial scholarship to study at the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, where she experienced bullying. She remarked: "I was different and that's the one thing you can't be at school, because you're ostracised. I didn't have the money these kids had". As a working child actress, she was not present in class for a considerable amount of time, and recalled having "more absences in the first month than you're supposed to have for an entire year". She then briefly attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, but dropped out due to acting obligations. Gellar graduated from the Professional Children's School in 1994 as a "straight A" student with a 4.0 grade average. As she spent significant time working on All My Children while "trying to graduate", the majority of her senior year was completed through guided study.

At the age of four, Gellar was spotted by an agent in a restaurant in Upper Manhattan. Two weeks later, she auditioned for a part in the television film An Invasion of Privacy. At the audition, she read both her own lines and those of Valerie Harper, impressing the directors enough to cast her in the role. The film aired on CBS in January 1983.

While growing up, Gellar appeared in television commercials for a variety of brands such as Burger King, Shake 'n Bake, Duncan Hines, Milton Bradley, LJN, and Avon. A 1982 advertisement for Burger King, in which she claimed the brand made larger and better tasting burgers than competitor McDonald's, was one of the first attack ads in the fast food industry. Executives at McDonald's parent company were so enraged that they sued all parties involved, naming Gellar and reportedly banning her from eating at the food chain. In a 2004 interview, she recalled: "I wasn't allowed to eat there. It was tough because, when you're a little kid, McDonald's is where all your friends have their birthday parties, so I missed out on a lot of apple pies." She was signed as a model for Wilhelmina.