London - Already described as the film of the year, Gravity tells the story of how a cloud of fast-moving debris smashes into the crew of the Space Shuttle Explorer as they embark on a spacewalk to service the Hubble Telescope.
With the shuttle crippled and most of her colleagues dead, rookie astronaut Dr Ryan Stone faces a lonely battle for survival, all the while haunted by the death of her four-year-old daughter back on Earth.
Three of Hollywood’s biggest female stars - Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman - turned down the demanding lead role in Gravity, the masterpiece of 3D special effects that has stunned audiences across the world and must surely be propelling its star, Sandra Bullock, towards a second Oscar.
At 49, she is now ranked as Hollywood’s most successful actress. And given that her new hit has taken $150 million in America so far, and has been No. 1 at the box office in Britain for two weeks, it’s little wonder.
Many cinema-goers will have been doubly impressed by her latest performance: how did ‘America’s sweetheart’, the bubbly, unaffected and supremely likeable Queen of rom-com in such light films as Miss Congeniality and The Proposal summon up the desolation of a woman trapped in space with no apparent way home? Bullock has provided part of the answer, admitting she was able to draw on her own experience as a mother of a young son.
It was “horrible” to play Stone, she said, “just because my whole world revolves around my own little boy, so to go to work and imagine for three months [on set] that my child no longer existed wasn’t the best place to put myself.”
What she didn’t say was that the little boy waiting for her at home in Austin, Texas, is a four-year-old African-American boy she adopted and has brought up on her own after her husband cheated on her in about the most despicable and humiliating way imaginable.
For all her engaging grinning and snorting laughter, not to mention her reputation as one of Hollywood’s most easy-going stars, Bullock was in one sense perfectly cast in Gravity. For she, too, had her own happy, settled existence suddenly swept away - not by space debris, but by serial adultery - and was forced to “come down to Earth” and rebuild her life.
Bullock refuses to say much publicly about what her co-star and old friend George Clooney described as her “tough years”.
But when she talks about her character’s struggle - “When adversity hits, what do we do? We isolate and find ourselves more alone than ever” - it’s hard not to think she’s speaking from bitter experience.
Finally, a few weeks ago she alluded to her broken marriage, admitting that there were parallels between her latest screen role and her own life. “I’ve been on the floor and I’ve been heartbroken,” she said. “I didn’t know how I was going to stand up. But I just gave it time.”
The daughter of a German opera singer and a voice coach father, Bullock was nearly 30 before she made her breakthrough film - the bomb-on-a-bus thriller Speed. She branched out successfully into romantic comedies, but her own private life was nothing to laugh about.
A string of ill-fated relationships began with with actor Tate Donovan, to whom she was engaged in her 20s during a three-year relationship which she later described as “the greatest love of my life”. She admits she “chased him like a dog” but he ended up dumping her.
Bullock also pursued actor Matthew McConaughey after working with him on a film in 1996, moving out of Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, to be near him. But that relationship also fizzled after a few years.
Then there was a little-known two-year relationship with Hollywood heartthrob Ryan Gosling, who is 16 years her junior. “Too much trial and error” was how she recently summed up her love life.
It all seemed to have changed dramatically when, in 2005 and aged 41, she married multi-tattooed Jesse James, a motorcycle builder and host of Monster Garage, a vehicle-makeover TV show. Eyebrows shot up across Hollywood, not only because Bullock had previously been sniffy about marriage but also because rough diamond James, who already had three children from two marriages, rang the changes from her pretty boy actors.
They had first met when Bullock took her ten-year-old godson to see James’s £75 000 custom-built bikes, and they secretly became engaged the following year.
The oddly-matched couple arrived for their sunset wedding on a California ranch in a huge red truck. The bride walked down the aisle to a recording of her late mother performing the aria Casta Diva and gave James - five years her junior - a ring she’d made herself.
Hollywood sneered that the marriage couldn’t last, but Bullock felt she knew better. “Those who know us - really know us - realise that is not going to be the case,” she assured an interviewer.
But James was not the classiest catch. Four years into the marriage, Bullock was dragged into James’s custody battle with his second wife, a former porn star named Janine Lindemulder, over the child she had had with him. Bullock and James won custody of the five-year-old girl and, given that they were already trying to adopt a black baby from New Orleans - after being deeply moved when they visited the troubled city after Hurricane Katrina - a happy family life finally beckoned.
In interview after interview, the star couldn’t contain her delight at finally finding domestic bliss. “My greatest joy is making our home what it’s supposed to be,” she trilled. “Being a good wife, a good stepmom ... we’re a family.”
“I never knew what it was like for someone to have my back … I never allowed myself to be cared for or protected that way in a relationship.”
The actress’s illusions were swept away in March 2010. Weeks earlier, Bullock and James had secretly brought home a baby boy, Louis, the result of a four-year process to adopt him from New Orleans.
Bullock’s happiness had been compounded by winning her first Oscar, playing a devoted mother in the American football film The Blind Side, when she in turn was blindsided. At least four women were reported to have had affairs with James during his five-year marriage to Bullock.
Another eight or so illicit sexual relationships were also rumoured. If the seediness of her rivals wasn’t hurtful enough, to make matters worse, the actress had to learn of his serial cheating from her publicist.
Tattooed stripper Michelle ‘Bombshell’ McGee was the first to surface. She claimed she’d had an 11-month affair with James while Bullock was away filming The Blind Side. Her lover, she recalled, never wore his wedding ring.
Melissa Smith, another heavily tattooed stripper, claimed she had a two-year affair with James after they met via the social networking site MySpace in 2006. She said she would visit him for sex at his workshop in Long Beach, California, every few months until 2009. Brigitte Daguerre, a fetish model and photographer, said they had a two-year relationship - exchanging steamy emails and text messages as well as sleeping together, before she ended their affair.
A fourth, unnamed woman claimed she had had a three-year relationship with James.
Lindemulder (James’ ex-wife) twisted the knife for Bullock, saying: “I feel so sorry for Sandra because she was so in love that she was blind and gullible.” What could be more humiliating for a Hollywood actress than patronising sympathy from a porn star?
The hapless Bullock, who had cancelled a European promotional tour for The Blind Side due to “unforeseen personal reasons”, had seemingly become another victim of the ‘Oscars curse’ whereby the love lives of women who win Best Actress promptly fall apart.
She went silent and waited for her husband’s response. He grovellingly apologised to his wife and three children for causing “pain and embarrassment beyond comprehension”. He then entered a clinic for sex addiction and, a month later, Bullock filed for divorce and finalised the adoption of Louis as a single parent.
Feeling “permanently broken”, she now reveals, she went into hiding and allowed time to heal her wounds.
Bullock has never liked the glitzy Hollywood life and being a single mom has given her even more of an excuse to retreat to unstarry Texas.
Nowadays, the Gravity star has her feet firmly on the ground. There is no man in her life and she says she doesn’t care. The actress recently stunned the hosts of a US TV chat show when she announced that she’d like to have another child “if it comes our way”. When asked if she meant adopting again, she wouldn’t say.
Life before Louis was empty, she now realises. “I had no idea what love was. I had no idea what lack of sleep was. I had no idea what milestones felt like.”
Those millions of fans who watch Gravity, rapt at Sandra Bullock’s portrait of a woman’s courage, would do well to consider that her bravest role of all was played off screen, not hundreds of miles up in space. - Daily Mail