Sarah Michelle Gellar is an American actress. After being spotted by a talent agent as a young child, she made her film debut at age six in the television film An Invasion of Privacy (1983). A leading role in the short-lived teen drama series Swans Crossing (1992) was followed by her breakthrough as Kendall Hart on the ABC soap opera All My Children (1993–1995), for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award.

Gellar was born on Long Island, New York on April 14, 1977. She is the only child of Rosellen (née Greenfield), a nursery school teacher, and Arthur Gellar, a garment worker. Both of her parents are Jewish, though Gellar's family also had a Christmas tree during her childhood. In 1984, when she was seven, her parents divorced and she was raised by her mother on Manhattan's Upper East Side. While growing up, she lost contact with her father, from whom she remained estranged until his death in 2001. She once described him as "non-existent", and stated: "My father, you can just say, is not in the picture. I'm not being deliberately evasive about him, it's just that there's so little to say." Gellar was a competitive figure skater, once finishing in third place at a New York State regional competition, as well as having a black belt in taekwondo.

Gellar met her future husband, Freddie Prinze Jr., while they were filming the 1997 teen horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer, but the two did not begin dating until 2000. They were engaged in April 2001 and married in Mexico on September 1, 2002, in a ceremony officiated by Adam Shankman, a director and choreographer with whom Gellar had worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.