Little wonder that Sandra Bullock has been tagged as America's "Girl Next Door" she was voted "Most Likely to Brighten Your Day" by her high school senior class.  That she landed an action role as a plucky heroine in Speed as her breakout performance was a coup: That's just how we'd like to imagine The Girl Next Door.

Fame, fortune and a fanatical following was proof of the contagious concoction.  Despite being descended from a German Theatrical family (her mother was a German opera singer, her father a voice coach), her beginnings in show business were inauspicious.  Her first starring role was in a short-lived TV series called Working Girl, based on the hit motion picture.

Sandra then made the rounds in a succession of forgettable B pictures (Love Potion No.9, Who Shot Patakango, When the Party's Over, The Vanishing and The Thing CalledLove), but her charm and hard work eventually paid off.  In 1993, she re-enacted a show business tradition by gaining recognition as a replacement (for Tank Girl Lori Petty) in the futuristic crime drama Demolition Man, opposite Sylvester Stallone.

A bus that couldn't travel under 50 mph and serious screen chemistry with Keanu Reeves followed, and Sandra Bullock was a star.  Romantic comedy was another Sandra success story, with While You Were Sleeping causing cooing, cuddling and cash worldwide.  She followed up with The Net as the best-looking computer programmer in the history of geekdom.

In Two If by Sea she starred opposite chain smoking, fast-talking funnyman Dennis Leary; in A Time To Kill, an adaptation of the John Grisham novel, she appeared with Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson and Matthew McConaughey; and in Richard Attenborough's In Love and War, a film about the young Ernest Hemingway, she played a World War I nurse opposite Chris O'Donnell.

Sandra also starred in the much-anticipated sequel to her break-out hit, Speed 2:Cruise Control, with Jason Patric.  Sandra's own production company, Fortis Films, produced Hope Floats, directed by Forst Whitaker, as well as Practical Magic, the story of two New England sisters who practice magic.  Who ever knew that the Girl Next Door was doing that?