Sarah Michelle Gellar

Sarah Michelle Prinze (born April 14, 1977), known professionally by her birth name of Sarah Michelle Gellar (play /ˈɡɛlər/), is an American film and television actress. She became widely known for her role as Buffy Summers on the WB/UPN television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for which she won six Teen Choice Awards and the Saturn Award for Best Genre TV Actress and received a Golden Globe Award nomination. 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.
Her film work includes starring roles in I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Cruel Intentions (1999); Scooby-Doo (2002); the American remake of Japanese horror film The Grudge (2004); and The Return (2006). Gellar also played an ex-porn star in Richard Kelly's Southland Tales (2007) and was part of an ensemble cast in The Air I Breathe (2008). Gellar also starred in Veronika Decides to Die (2009). Most recently she has been cast as the protagonist in the new television series, Ringer which airs on the The CW in fall 2011.
Gellar was born in New York City. She is the only child of Rosellen (née Greenfield), a nursery school teacher, and Arthur Gellar, a garment worker. Both of her parents were Jewish, though Gellar's family had a Christmas tree during the holidays while she was growing up. In 1984, when she was 7 years old, her parents divorced and she was brought up solely by her mother on the Upper East Side. She graduated from Fiorello LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts in 1995. Gellar was estranged from her father until his death from liver cancer on October 9, 2001
At the age of four, she was spotted by an agent in a restaurant in Uptown Manhattan. Two weeks later, she auditioned for a part in An Invasion of Privacy, a made-for-television film starring Valerie Harper, Carol Kane and Jeff Daniels. At the audition, Gellar read both her own lines and those of Harper, impressing the directors enough to cast her in the role. 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. This led to a lawsuit by McDonald's. As a child, Gellar modeled for magazines.
Gellar's first major break came in 1992, when she starred in the serial Swans Crossing and was subsequently cast in the soap opera All My Children, playing Kendall Hart, the long-lost daughter of character Erica Kane (Susan Lucci). In 1995, at the age of eighteen, she won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series for the role. It was on the set of this soap opera that she met Michelle Trachtenberg, who would later join the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Gellar also met co-star Sydney Penny, with whom she remains friends.
Gellar left All My Children in 1995. Gellar stated that she was screen tested eleven times (originally auditioning for the role of Cordelia), before she landed the lead in the 1997 TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, playing a teenager burdened with the responsibility of fighting a number of mystical foes, mostly vampires. The show was well received by critics and audiences alike, spawning a spin-off series (Angel), which featured three episodes in which she guest starred. Throughout its seven seasons and a total of 144 episodes, Buffy, and by extension Gellar, became cult icons in the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia, particularly as an archetype of an "empowered" woman. Gellar sang several of the songs during the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode "Once More, with Feeling", which spawned an original cast album.