An only child raised on New York's Upper East Side by a divorced schoolteacher mother, Sarah Michelle Gellar was a natural-born ham. At 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 sizeable role, playing Valerie Harper's daughter in the 1983 TV movie An Invasion of Privacy. Her first commercial, in which she acted as a pint-sized Burger King shill who chides McDonalds for serving such skimpy patties, resulted in a now-famous disparagement lawsuit against her employers dubbed "The Battle of the Burgers."
     The year 1993 delivered up Gellar's first solid, adult role, that of Erica Kane's long-lost, 22-year-old bad-seed daughter, Kendall Hart, on the daytime drama All My Children. Her first-rate villainy was rewarded in 1994 with an Emmy for Outstanding Younger Actress.
     In 1996, the bombshell soap vet was chosen to play the title role of the action-packed splatter series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By day, she's a clique-skewering wit; by night, a scantily clad, high-kicking, stake-wielding, vampire-slaying badass.
Gellar and real-life love, husband Freddie Prinze, Jr., live in Los Angeles.