Gellar wowed the casting supervisors at her audition by reading her lines and those of Harper, and she was given the part. A short while later, she was cast in a controversial Burger King ad where she attacked Mcdonald's and declared that she only ate there. As a result, Burger King, advertising firm J. Walter Thompson, and Gellar were sued.
Gellar testified for the defense in court. Outside of court, the disagreement was resolved. After that, Gellar kept producing advertisements and appeared in TV shows in minor roles. When her parents split in 1984, her mother raised her on the Upper East Side.
Until his death on October 9, 2001, from liver cancer, she remained estranged from her father, Arthur Gellar. After that, Gellar attended Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School in New York. The same year, she played Emily in an episode of Robert Urich's TV show Spenser: For Hire, landing her third TV role.
She filmed throughout Europe for the TV series Crossbow, which is based on William Tell, and had a brief role in Chevy Chase's comedy flick Funny Farm. Tara Reid, Macaulay Culkin, Rebecca Gayheart, Jerry O'Connell, and Gellar attended the Professional Children's School. Jerry O'Connell was a boy Gellar dated in 1988.
Gellar excelled academically and developed into a skilled figure skater. Melissa Joan Hart, who subsequently starred in the television programs Clarissa Explains It All and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, was her closest friend. In the film High Stakes, with Sally Kirkland, Gellar played a character. In A Woman Called Jackie in 1991, she portrayed a young Jacqueline Bouvier.
Her breakthrough role was in the adolescent soap opera Swan's Crossing in 1992. She then went on to feature in the soap opera All My Children as the cunning character Kendall Hart, the long-lost daughter of Erica Kane (played by Susan Lucci).
She received a Daytime Emmy Award in 1995 for Outstanding Younger Leading Actress in a Drama Series when she was 18.
After leaving All My Children in 1995, Gellar won the lead role in Joss Whedon's television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an adolescent who must battle a myriad of otherworldly enemies with the help of her allies and her Watcher (a teacher of sorts).
The program got positive reviews from critics and viewers alike, and throughout its seven seasons and 144 episodes, Buffy and Gellar joined her as cult figures in the US and the UK. In the musical Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Once Again, with Feeling," which gave rise to an original cast CD, Gellar sang several of the songs.
Gellar has graced the covers of several magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Glamour, FHM, Rolling Stone, and many more. She is a Maybelline model and has been in various Got Milk? commercials. She was included in FHM's 100 Hottest Ladies of 2005 and Maxim's Hot 100 lists from 2002, 2003, and 2005.
People Magazine recognized her as one of the "50 Most Gorgeous Persons (in the World)" in 1998. She sought to use her notoriety on Buffy to use her television celebrity, to launch a career in movies, but her efforts met with sporadic economic success.
She appeared in the thriller Irresistible after appearing in Wes Craven's I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2. This movie extensively plagiarised from Like Water for Chocolate and included a supernatural crab. Cruel Intentions, a contemporary adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, was her next movie and included a lesbian kiss between Gellar and Selma Blair.
She also appeared in the Stone Temple Pilots'' music video for "Sour Girl" in 1999. She next portrayed the lead in James Toback's critically panned 2001 film Harvard Man before finding box office success as Daphne in the live-action Scooby-Doo. Despite being widely derided by reviewers, she also appeared in Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, the film's sequel (2004).
Gellar costarred in The Return in 2005 alongside Sam Shepard and Peter O'Brien; the same year, she also released Southland costarred filmed The Air I Breathe in Mexico City in 2006 alongside Kevin Bacon, Brendan Fraser, Andy Garcia, and Forest Whitaker. In a cameo appearance for The Grudge 2, she again played Karen Davis.
She will make a brief cameo in The Grudge 2 to inflict the curse on Amber Tamblyn's character's sister. Sarah is now appearing alongside Alec Baldwin in the film adaptation of the same-named book, A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing. In 2006, Gellar was anticipated to begin filming Alice, a movie based on the American McGee game.
The release of Alice is anticipated for the summer of 2007. As of right now, she has a total of 8 movies in various phases of development. Gellar married Freddie Prinze, Jr., an actor who costarred with her in the Scooby Doo movies, on September 1 in Jalisco, Mexico.
