Sarah Michelle Gellar pictures

Don’t let the ‘overnight’ success of Sarah Michell Gellar’s career fool you: this babe has been kicking show business butt since she was about four years old. Discovered by an agent while chowing down in a restaurant with her mom, Gellar started down the road to stardom by playing Valerie Harper’s daughter in An Invasion of Privacy (1983). Within a short time, she had more than 100 commercial credits, including some for the Burger King chain, and parts in popular shows like Spenser: For Hire.

Her first really substantial role was a young Jaqueline Bouvier (Kennedy-Onassis) in an NBC miniseries (1991); not long after that, she joined the cast of All My Children as a seriously evil dudette in the daytime soap. As Erica Kane’s long lost daughter, she faked a pregnancy, shot someone, broke up Kane’s and attempted suicide – and won an Emmy for all that hard work.

Of course we all know and love her as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996), the cult-hit TV series based on the 1992 movie (Kirsty Swanson, Luke Perry). A typical teen suffering through the perils of high school by day, she spends her evenings slicing and dicing the town’s never ending stream of supernatural baddies. She’s parlayed her TV success into a string of hit movie roles, including I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream 2, and more recently, Cruel Intentions.