"Buffy is a life I can really understand. You want to go to the prom , but at the same time, you have work obligations. Do you have a date or do you go sit in a cemetery all night?"
PEOPLE expect an awful lot from a female role-model these days. It is not enough for a woman protagonist to be beautiful, intelligent, witty and in possession of a trend setting wardrobe-she's also got to kick some serious ass. And if the popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayers Sarah Michelle Gellar is any indication, the pinicale of feminist empowerment in the 90's is kicking some serious supernatural ass. Gellar's butt-whipping derring-do on the series is muchmore realistic because she has a brown belt of the Tae-Kwon-Do variety.
An only child raised on New Yorks Upper East side by a divorced school teacher mother, Gellar was a natual born ham. At the tender age of three-and-a-half she was spotted by an agent while dining at a restaurant with her mother. Within a matter of weeks she had landed her first sizable role, playing "Valerie Harper's" daughter in the 1993 tv movie "An Invasion of Privacy".
In 1996 the bombshell soap vet was chosen to play the title role of the action packed splatter series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", amid season replacement based on createrJoss Whedon's script for the moderately popular 1992 feature of the same title that starred Kirsty Swanson and Luke Perry. The series positions the twenty something Gellar as a not so typical teen who is compelled by destiny to act as this century's one and only slayer. In this unenivable capacity, she must use her considerable supernatural endowments to rid the streets of her "One-Starbucks town". Sunnydale, Calafornia, of any undead nasties that emerge at night from the portal to hell located rather inconveniently beneath her high school. As if that weren't enough, Buffy must simultaneously endure the typical surburbanite teens no less horrifying adolescent traumas - by day, she's clique-skewering wit, by night a scantily clad, high-kicking, stake wielding, vampire slaying bad ass.
In the second season, Buffy reingned as the gighest ranking offering from the WB, and achieved cult favourite status in a suprisingly short span of time; as for its star, commanded uniformely favourable critical attention for her deft physicality and comic flare. The shows popularity has had the attendant benefit of expanding Gellar's Big Screen options. The petite ingenue, who has been in front of cameras for most of her life, appeared in two 1997 thrillers: she played a small town beauty queen with a damning secret in "I Know What You Did Last Summer", and she also played a sorority girl who meets a grisly demise in the sequel to Wes Cravens phenomenaly popular 1996 horror flick "Scream". 1999 witnessed a starring turn in the cloying romantic comedy "Simply Irresistable", in which she sketches a Manhatten restauranteur who is inspired by her love for a department store executive to create culinary magic; and "Cruel Intentions", a trashy teen adaptation of Choderlos de Lanclos' 1782 novel "Les Liasons Dangereuses"
