Sarah Michelle Gellar Trivia: 38 fun facts about the actress!

Sarah Michelle Gellar is an American actress, producer, and entrepreneur.

Let’s see some interesting facts about her!

1. Sarah Michelle Prinze was born April 14, 1977 in New York City.

2. She is the only child of Rosellen, a nursery school teacher, and Arthur Gellar, a garment worker.

3. Both of her parents were Jewish, though Gellar’s family also had a Christmas tree during her childhood.

4. In 1984, when she was seven, her parents divorced and she was raised by her mother on the city’s Upper East Side.

5. While growing up with her mother, she lost contact with her father, from whom she remained estranged until his death in 2001; she once described him as “non-existent”, and in the early 2000s, she 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.”

6. Besides being a working child at the time, Gellar was a competitive figure skater, finishing in third place at the New York State regional competition.

7. She also placed fourth at a Tae Kwon Do competition at Madison Square Garden (she was a black belt).

8. Gellar was given a partial scholarship to study at the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, as her mother was not able to pay full tuition, for which she was constantly bullied.

9. She said in an interview with The Independent: “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”.

10. Gellar was not present in class for most of the time at the school as she had to work in several acting projects simultaneously, recalling that she “had more absences in the first month than you’re supposed to have for an entire year. I was telling them that I had back problems and had to go to the doctor the whole time”.

11. Gellar then briefly attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, but dropped out due to acting obligations; the teachers threatened to fail her because of her constant absence from classes as she was busy going to auditions, despite earning good grades.

12. Gellar graduated from the Professional Children’s School, in 1994 as a “straight A” student with a 4.0 grade average.

13. As Gellar spent significant time working on All My Children while “trying to graduate”, the majority of her senior year was completed through guided study.

14. At the age of four, she 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, with Valerie Harper, Carol Kane and Jeff Daniels.

15. At the audition, Gellar read both her own lines and those of Harper, impressing the directors enough to cast her in the role.

16. The film aired on CBS in January 1983.

17. She subsequently appeared in a controversial television commercial for Burger King, in which her character criticized McDonald’s and claimed to eat only at Burger King.

18. While growing up, Gellar also worked as a model for Wilhemina and acted in numerous television commercials.

19. During the 1980s, Gellar played minor roles in the films Over the Brooklyn Bridge (1984), Funny Farm (1988) and High Stakes (1989), and also guest starred in various television series, such as Spenser: For Hire and Crossbow.

20. At the age of nine, she appeared alongside Matthew Broderick and Eric Stoltz in the Broadway production The Widow Claire.

21. She served briefly as a co-host of the teen girl talk show Girl Talk, which aired in 1989.

22. Her first leading part was in the 1992 miniseries Swans Crossing, for which she was nominated for two Young Artist Awards.

23. Gellar’s television breakthrough came in 1993, when she originated the role of Kendall Hart on the ABC daytime soap opera All My Children, winning the 1995 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series.

24. Gellar received widespread recognition for her portrayal of Buffy Summers on the WB series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), which earned her five Teen Choice Awards, a Saturn Award and a Golden Globe Award nomination.

25. The character was widely popular during the airing of the show and became recognized as one of the 100 greatest female characters in U.S. television.

26. Gellar also gained significant attention for her appearances in the slasher movies I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream 2 (1997), and for her portrayal of Kathryn Merteuil in Cruel Intentions (1999).

27. She appeared as Daphne Blake in Scooby-Doo (2002), her biggest live action commercial success.

28. In 2004, Gellar reprised her role as Daphne in the sequel Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed and portrayed Karen Davis in the horror remake The Grudge, both of which grossed more than US$180 million worldwide.

29. She subsequently appeared in smaller scale movies such as The Return (2006) and Southland Tales (2007), and provided her voice for TMNT (2007).

30. Her later film credits include The Air I Breathe (2008), Possession (2009) and Veronika Decides to Die (2009).

31. She headlined the short lived television series Ringer (2011–2012) and The Crazy Ones (2013–2014), which co-starred Robin Williams.

32. In October 2015, Gellar co-founded Foodstirs, a food crafting brand and e-commerce startup selling baking kits for children.

33. Gellar met her future 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 begin dating until 2000.

34. They were engaged in April 2001 and married in Mexico on September 1, 2002, in a ceremony officiated by Adam Shankman, a director and choreographer with whom Gellar had worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

35. Prinze and Gellar have worked together several times; they played each other’s respective love interests as Fred and Daphne in the 2002 film Scooby-Doo and its sequel, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, and both provided their voices for the animated feature Happily N’Ever After (2007) and the animated series Star Wars Rebels.

36. In 2007, in honor of their fifth year of marriage, Gellar legally changed her name to Sarah Michelle Prinze.

37. Together, Gellar and Prinze have two children, a daughter and a son.

38. The family lives in Los Angeles.