Sandra Bullock on having her moment

You already know, dear reader, how Sandra Bullock’s Oscar night turns out, but at the time of going to press, I am reduced to crossing my fingers for her. Sandy, as the people who know her call her, has come a long way since she first starred in NBC’s television spin-off of the film Working Girl. In fact, she is now the most reliably popular female star in Hollywood (Forbes has her earnings at more than $100m), and, holed up at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, she now waits to learn whether her role in The Blind Side has earned her an Oscar for best actress.

Bullock is enjoying the calm before the storm, describing herself as follows for the benefit of my tape recorder: “Oh yes, I know how this goes, ‘In her cashmere Lanvin slacks, casually draped across the sofa of an elegant hotel suite, there she lies.’ But, is that me, really me? Tough to tell sometimes,” she ribs. Unexpectedly slight and tall, maybe 5ft 8in, with flawless skin that literally glows, Bullock, at 45, is finally having her moment, and she is surprisingly relaxed about it.

With a two-decade career as “cute gal in peril” behind her (see Speed and Fire on the Amazon), Bullock has also proven herself as romcom gold (see Miss Congeniality, Two Weeks Notice). Then last year, The Proposal, an enjoyably predictable romcom, grossed $160m in the United States alone. The Blind Side, a tougher drama altogether, has so far earned $250m in America, and all of a sudden, Bullock’s is the name that everybody wants topping their bill. In return, she is acting nonchalant — “Oh, it’s all just fun,” she says — although she could be bluffing. If The Blind Side has taught us anything, it’s that we underestimate her at our peril.

In the film, she plays the real-life Leigh Anne Tuohy, a Memphis businesswoman who adopts a homeless black teen called Michael Oher and helps him to become a star athlete. With her peroxide-blonde hair, gold miniskirts and sharp rasp, Bullock is every inch the prosperous, self-made Southerner — but not a bigot, racist or idiot.
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She almost didn’t take the role. “It took [the director] John Lee Hancock nearly a year to persuade me to meet Leigh Anne, and even then, I wasn’t sure I could do her justice. I also don’t think I could have done this role even five years ago, but, yes, having a family of my own helped clarify the dynamics in my head,” she says.

Like most Hollywood celebrities, Bullock successfully shields her private life. Until 2005, she was a bachelorette about town, dismissing marriage as a distant prospect. Aged 40, she was still ambivalent about the institution, asking: “Why is marriage the pinnacle for everyone? People get married for the wrong reasons. We need to start looking at different packages, whether it’s living together, or being with six partners, or dedicating your life to taking care of flowers.”

True to her unconventional take on the subject, she suddenly inherited a family when she married the television presenter Jesse James (a distant relative of the cowboy outlaw). The youngest of his three children, Sunny (she is also stepmum to Chandler and Jesse Jr), was the focus of a bruising custody battle last year. James and one of his ex-wives, a retired porn star, went to court over custody of their daughter, with James winning a battle that should never have been aired in public. “It came into the public domain incorrectly, but I will never say anything in public that the angel will ever read. It’s not my place. Our job is to protect and feed and raise three kids into the extraordinary human beings they will be, and it is an honour that I do not take for granted for a moment. Watching someone ace an algebra test, or get over something emotional at school, everything that makes you want to laugh or strangle someone — it’s amazing.”

The message of The Blind Side, Bullock says, is that a family must protect its weakest members. It is a lesson she fears America has forgotten, but one she has taken to heart. Today, someone important in her family is lacking a sense of direction, although she won’t say who. “This person in my household,” she says, sidestepping gender, “for some reason always wants to know which way they are facing, and now I can tell them. This is what I am here for; this is what family does.”

The question arose because she is playing fondly with a tiny compass strung around her neck on a key chain. She has been touching it like a talisman whenever she takes breath. “It’s a vintage compass from Birmingham, England, and my dad is from Birmingham, Alabama,” she reveals. “It also has a date on it that must have been important to the original owner, but which is also my father’s birthday.” It is mildly spooky, the kind of happy accident that Bullock says has always marked out her life as that of a “failed control freak”.

The daughter of a singer and a voice coach, she was born in Virginia, but grew up in Nuremberg, Germany, where her paternal grandfather, a rocket scientist, lived. She studied acting in New York, but nothing fell on her plate. “I actually retired from the business for a couple of years because nothing was happening for me, but that time out was good to me,” she says. “Now I live an hour and a half south of LA [in an Orange County beach house, but she also spends half her time in a 1940s cottage in Austin, Texas, where she owns a restaurant and a bakery] and that keeps me grounded. Also, family helps.”

Having to wait for recognition has made her a realist. One big difference, she says, between Leigh Anne Tuohy and her is that her Blind Side alter ego is an optimist, whereas Bullock is of a darker mindset. “I used to be an optimist, but now I know that nothing is going to turn out as I expect — although often it is better. There is room for therapy there, but I don’t have time for it. I guess I can blame my pessimism on my Teutonic genes, which is lucky.”

Now she’s happily married, does she ever miss the freedom of her girl-about-town years? “Oh yeah, really. The trouble is that Lindsay and Paris haven’t invited me dancing recently, otherwise I’d be in all the tabloids too,” she says, suddenly jumping up from the sofa and shaking her hips, hair flying, laughing at herself.

I tell her about the SarcMark, a new bit of punctuation for computers and mobile phones denoting heavy irony that could have been invented for her. “Oh yes, I’m sarcastic all the time, especially in texts, but people seem to miss it. You can’t do ‘the thing’ [she air-writes inverted commas] on the phone. I need that SarcMark, it would make relationships so much easier.”

This sarky streak makes for good company. Bullock laughs a lot and wisecracks, just like in the movies, snorting and rolling her eyes at tabloid rumours that she uses an electrical-current treatment to firm her facial muscles (close inspection of her flawless jawline reveals no telltale knife marks, fyi).

Her sense of irony masks a softer side, however. For example: “In the movie, Leigh Anne and her daughter rule the house, and the three men get out of the way. It’s not the same in my household. We hang around the kitchen table and read the newspapers together, acting them out with voices and all, although the kids can get real sarcastic. They have a wicked sense of humour, scrappy, and I love them to death.”

The other significant difference between the two women lies in the art of shopping: “Leigh Anne is a big shopper, whereas I love clothes, but I don’t like to shop. I’ve learnt from painful mistakes about the pressure in the store to pay exorbitant amounts for stuff that isn’t right, and five years later it’s still in your closet with the tag on it. I have $900 guilt shoes. I’m thinking about putting them on a shelf with a spotlight on them to remind me about such mistakes.”
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She tells me that one of her favourite purchases were the $20 red patent-leather boots she wore in All About Steve, a nervy comedy that has earned her another nomination this awards season — that for worst actress at the Golden Raspberries, which are held in LA the day before the Oscars. If she wins (in stiff competition against the heavily favoured Megan Fox), she says she will raise her Razzie with pride. “That film is going to be seen as a classic in 10 years’ time, you wait and see,” she says. More sarcasm, or just a return of mad optimism?

Bullock refuses to discuss what she might wear at the Oscars — she has warned it might be a plastic bin bag covered with rhinestones. “I wish I could go the full McQueen, and bring back the spirit of Björk or Cher. His loss is very sad. So it will be something that my brilliant stylist [Deborah Waknin, who also works with Halle Berry] will pick out, maybe the result of thousands of craftsmen’s hours. But even if I knew, I would not tell you.”

She also says she will pick out aerodynamically pointy shoes, so she can throw them at Meryl Streep if she wins for Julie & Julia. “It’s so much more fun now that Meryl and I have made up, now that we are lovers. That is how seriously we all must take this stuff.” And she lets out another big roar of laughter. “Oh yes. Big, big SarcMark!”

-Tom Lee