Sarah Michelle Gellar

Her first controversy arrived at the age of five: she fronted a Burger King advert that attacked McDonald's by name, the competition sued and, as she has laughingly recalled, she was banned from McDonald's for years. That New York girl would grow up to become one of the most influential heroines in television history. Sarah Michelle Gellar was born in New York City on 14 April 1977 and grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, raised by her mother, a nursery school teacher, after a divorce that removed her father from her life for good.

A television child prodigy

A talent agent discovered her at four, while she was having dinner in a restaurant, and she never stopped: adverts, TV films and small parts, all juggled with competitive figure skating, in which she placed third in the New York State regionals, and taekwondo, in which she holds a black belt.

Her first great character arrived in the soap opera 'All My Children' (1993-1995), where she played the scheming Kendall Hart, long lost daughter of the legendary Erica Kane. The role won her a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Younger Actress in 1995, aged just eighteen. Daytime television was already too small for her.

Buffy Summers, a generational icon

In 1997, Joss Whedon handed her the role of her life: Buffy Summers, the cheerleader turned vampire slayer of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Across seven seasons (1997-2003), first on The WB and later on UPN, the series blended horror, humour and growing pains like nothing before it, and its heroine became a feminist and generational icon, a fixture on lists of television's greatest characters and the subject of so much academic study that the field even earned a nickname, Buffy studies.

The phenomenon brought her a Golden Globe nomination for best actress in a drama, a Saturn Award and a string of Teen Choice trophies, along with something harder to measure: a legion of fans who, three decades on, still hail the Slayer as the pioneer of every television heroine that followed.

Queen of screams (and of the MTV kiss)

While she saved the world on television, she conquered teen horror at the cinema. In 1997 she strung together I Know What You Did Last Summer, alongside Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Scream 2, becoming the new scream queen. On that first shoot, moreover, she met a young actor called Freddie Prinze Jr. Life was already writing its best script.

In 1999 she proved she could play wicked too: her Kathryn Merteuil in Cruel Intentions, with Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon, remains one of teen cinema's most remembered characters, and her kiss with Selma Blair won the MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss and made pop culture history. That year she also popped up in a cameo in She's All That, after voicing a toy in Small Soldiers (1998).

The new century brought Daphne in Scooby-Doo (2002) and Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004), sharing the screen with her by then husband, and a number one at the American box office with the Japanese horror remake The Grudge (2004), which took close to forty million dollars in its opening weekend alone, followed by a brief appearance in The Grudge 2 (2006).

Riskier bets followed: the apocalyptic satire Southland Tales (2006), the ensemble drama The Air I Breathe (2007), the voice of April in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2007) and the Paulo Coelho adaptation Veronika Decides to Die (2009), plus thrillers such as The Return (2005).

From 'Ringer' to 'Dexter'

Her television comeback was double, literally: in 'Ringer' (2011-2012) she played twin sisters swapping lives. Then came 'The Crazy Ones' (2013-2014), the comedy in which she sparred with Robin Williams in what became the comedian's final series, and whose sudden death in 2014 affected her deeply, as she has often recalled.

After years devoted to her family, she returned in force: she was the headmistress in Netflix's poisonous comedy Do Revenge (2022), an investigator and executive producer on Wolf Pack (2023) and the forensics chief bossing a young Dexter Morgan around in Dexter: Original Sin (2024). In 2025 she even allowed herself the pleasure of resurrecting Helen Shivers with a wink in the franchise's return, I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025).

The Buffy comeback that never was

The most anticipated project, however, ended in heartbreak. In 2025 Hulu ordered the pilot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale, the sequel that would bring her back as Buffy, now mentoring a new slayer played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, with Oscar winner Chloé Zhao directing the opening episode and Gellar herself executive producing.

But on 14 March 2026 it was Gellar who announced that the platform would not be moving forward with the series, a blow to fans that Hulu has not ruled out reviving in the future with a new creative team. She, meanwhile, is not standing still: 2026 brings the horror sequel Ready or Not: Here I Come and the animated adventure Stop! That! Train!.

Freddie, Charlotte and Rocky

Her personal life is a Hollywood rarity: a single love story. With Freddie Prinze Jr., whom she met on the set of I Know What You Did Last Summer, she began dating in 2000 and married in Mexico on 1 September 2002. One of the industry's most solid and discreet marriages, they have two children, Charlotte Grace (2009) and Rocky James (2012), and she even legally changed her surname to Prinze in 2007.

A confessed entrepreneur, she co-founded the organic baking company Foodstirs in 2015 and published the cookbook 'Stirring Up Fun with Food' (2017), faithful to a very personal philosophy: cook with the family and walk red carpets only when strictly necessary. Not bad for the little girl McDonald's would not let through its doors. Who could have told her then that she would end up as a whole generation's favourite heroine? For millions, she is still simply Buffy.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Sarah Michelle Gellar is Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (1997); in all, 18 films and 7 TV shows over 29 years. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is American Dad! (2005), with 89 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2000s, with 12 titles. The person they have worked with most is Freddie Prinze Jr., on 5 films, among them Scooby-Doo and Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.