Born on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., to a German opera singer and a voice teacher, Bullock grew up largely on the road. She studied music and dance while she traveled throughout Europe, and made her first stage appearance at the age of 5 in a small role for an opera in Nuremburg, Germany. The performance helped her to develop a love of the stage, and she began appearing regularly in the Nuremburg children's choir. When Bullock was 12,
her family moved back to the D.C. area, where she attended Washington-Lee High School. Bullock had no problem fitting in, becoming involved in cheerleading and school theater productions until her graduation in 1982. Bullock then enrolled in East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, to study acting,
but left college only three credits shy of her bachelor's degree. Instead, she moved to New York in 1986 to pursue acting in earnest. She joined the Neighborhood Playhouse Theatre, where she took acting classes, and supported herself with waitressing and bartending work.
Bullock landed her first gig at the age of 21 in an off-Broadway production of No Time Flat. Bullock used the critical acclaim for her role in the play, to land an agent. But Bullock's early acting jobs, which included bit parts in TV movies and B-movies, were unsuccessful and sometimes embarrassing. She made a short run as Tess McGill on the ill-fated NBC sitcom Working Girl (based on the hit movie of the same name), followed by a co-starring role in the romantic comedy Love Potion No. 9 (1992).
In 1993, Bullock replaced Lori Petty in the futuristic Sylvester Stallone vehicle Demolition Man, but critics largely panned the film as "incoherent" and "one-dimensional." It was in the box-office hit Speed (1994), that Bullock first earned widespread recognition. Playing opposite Keanu Reeves, Bullock's plucky performance helped propel the commercial success of what was an otherwise generic action feature.
In the mid-1990s, Bullock appeared in steady stream of big-budget productions of varying commercial success. While films like While You Were Sleeping (1995), The Net (1995), and A Time to Kill (1996) performed well, others such as Two If By Sea (1996) and Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997),
were box-office flops. In an attempt to expand her dramatic range, Bullock appeared as an alcoholic newspaper columnist sent to rehab, in 28 Days (2000).
The film, a mix of dark comedy and melodrama, received tepid reviews, although her comedy Miss Congeniality did well at the box office that same year. After a brief hiatus, Bullock returned in early 2002 with Murder by Numbers, a crime thriller in which she plays a detective responsible for tracking down a duo of thrill-killers.
She also appeared in a film version of the best-selling novel The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Two Weeks' Notice, a romantic comedy co-starring Hugh Grant.