Secret pain behind Sandra Bullock's smile as A-list star cared for sick husband
With £200million in the bank, a groaning portfolio of properties and a swathe of box office hits under her belt, you’d be forgiven for thinking Sandra Bullock has the world at her feet.
But away from the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles, the Hollywood star has been holed up in her five-bedroom Victorian-era mansion in New Orleans, Louisiana, caring for her sick partner as he slowly deteriorated from motor neurone disease. Now Sandra, 59, has been left devastated by the loss of Bryan Randall, who died this week aged 57 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of the progressive neurological disorder. Having taken a step back from her glittering acting career over the last few years, behind closed doors the Oscar-winning star has been looking after Bryan along with a team of nurses, helped by their three children.
The star of Speed, Miss Congeniality and The Blind Side - for which she won an Academy Award in 2010 - had kept Bryan’s condition quiet at his request. In a statement, Sandra’s sister Gesine Bullock-Prado praised her for the “amazing” way she cared for Bryan in his final years, adding: “ALS is a cruel disease but there is some comfort in knowing he had the best of caretakers in my amazing sister and the band of nurses she assembled who helped her look after him in their home.”
Bryan’s death is a devastating end to a love story that began when Sandra first met him in 2015 at her son Louis’ birthday party, which he’d been hired to photograph. After they fell for each other, he slotted in perfectly with her blended family, bringing with him daughter Skylar from a previous relationship, but the actress was adamant she would never marry again after the painful split from her cheating first husband, biker Jesse James.
Sandra has taken a backseat from acting (Getty Images)
Sandra and Bryan in Los Angeles (KSJ)“I am someone who went through the divorce process,” she said in 2021. “I found the love of my life. We share two beautiful children — three children, his older daughter. It’s the best thing ever. I don’t wanna say, ‘Do it like I do it,’ but I don’t need a paper to be a devoted partner and devoted mother. I don’t need to be told to be ever-present in the hardest of times. I don’t need to be told to weather a storm with a good man.”
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Bryan’s death was, sadly, far from the first of many storms for Sandra. In 2010, after filing for divorce following numerous reports of Jesse’s infidelity, Sandra spoke about being left reeling by a 2004 picture of her soon-to-be-ex-husband posing in Nazi regalia while throwing a Heil Hitler salute. Bullock, whose maternal grandfather was a German rocket scientist from Nuremberg and who herself has German citizenship, said the image showed James ‘wasn’t the man she married’. “The photo shocked me and made me sad,” she said at the time. “This was stupid, this was ignorant. Racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, anything Nazi and a boatload of other things have no place in my life.”
After their divorce, Sandra continued with plans to adopt baby son Louis as a single parent. Five years later she adopted her second child, daughter Laila, who was then three years old and had been in foster care since birth. “When I look at Laila, there’s no doubt in my mind that she was supposed to be here,” she said then. “I can tell you absolutely, the exact right children came to me at the exact right time.” Her family, she added, “is blended and diverse, nutty, and loving and understanding. That’s a family”.
Sandra with Tate Donovan (Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
The actress with Matthew McConaughey (Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)With her growing fame and popularity - her Forces of Nature co-star Ben Affleck once joked that every studio executive he spoke to was “going after” Sandra for their lead female role - also came obsessive fans. One stalked her across several states until she took out multiple restraining orders against him. Another, a woman, was caught lying outside her and James’ Orange County home and attempted to run him over when the biker confronted her. A third stalker, Joshua James Corbett, left Sandra terrified when he broke into her LA home in 2014 and subjected her to a frightening ordeal that only ended when she barricaded herself into a closet and called the police.
After breaking in through the sunroom, he had lurked inside her house for an hour while she slept. She woke up at around 1am, hearing loud banging coming from within. When she got up to lock her door, she saw the intruder in the hallway wearing dark clothing. He had been loitering outside her home for several days, jotting down his obsessive thoughts about the actress and professing his love in a spiral notebook. When the police arrived, Corbett screamed, “Sandy, I’m sorry. Please don’t press charges.”
The “violation” left Sandra with extreme anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and she admitted she “hadn’t been the same” since. “My house was broken into while I was in it,” she recalled. “I’m in the closet going, ‘This doesn’t end well.’ I’m in the closet, [which is] not gonna help.”
Sandra and Bob Schneider (Getty Images)
The Speed star with ex-husband Jesse James (Getty Images)Louis, luckily, was away. “It was the one night that our nanny goes, ‘Let me just take him to my apartment, which is up the street because you’re going to be out late.’ Had he been home, I would’ve run to the closet, which is now my official closet but that was his bedroom, and it would have changed our destiny forever.”
Sandra was left with heart-stopping flashbacks that would leave her sobbing, but it was the fear of passing on her “trauma and shame” to her child that drove her to seek professional help. She turned to eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), a type of psychotherapy that uses side-to-side eye movements combined with structured talking therapy to help sufferers process traumatic memories. Prince Harry, too, has credited EMDR with helping him come to terms with his own childhood trauma. It was, for Sandra, a life-saver as she had been “unravelling” after the home intrusion and has never been alone since that day.
It also forced her to reassess her professional and private lives. Prior to the stalking incident, Louis had suffered a grand mal seizure when his temperature soared and his mum thought he was going to die. Just two days later, Sandra was bitten by a poisonous spider. Her hair began falling out in clumps as a result of the stressful events and she was worried her body was at breaking point.“I was looking at my body, and I said it’s going to break. It was not responding well to what was happening,” she remembered.
Sandra alongside Keanu Reeves in Speed (20th Century Fox)“My hair starts falling out. I have alopecia spots everywhere. I’m by the tub, laying out hair [counting] ‘one, two …’ I literally had to take inventory. ‘If I don’t pull it together, I’m gonna die. Something is going to happen to my body that I can’t control,’ and I can control almost everything.”
Years earlier, Sandra survived a plane crash in a private jet in December 2000, just months after the success of her film Miss Congeniality. She was lucky to escape uninjured along with the two crew, after the runway lights at Jackson Hole Airport failed to turn on during the night landing. Eight years later, while filming romantic comedy The Proposal, she escaped death again when she and her then-husband were hit head-on by a drunk driver while travelling through Massachusetts.
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Seeking help meant confronting those painful memories from her younger years and past relationships, which Sandra hadn’t realised were out of the ordinary. “When I got out of [EMDR therapy], I realised I have surrounded myself often with unsafe people and situations and put myself there,” she said. “I have no one else to blame but myself because that was the most familiar feeling I had.”
Sandra in The Blind Side (Ralph Nelson)In 2022 she quietly announced she was taking a step back from acting to focus on being a mum to her two kids and stepdaughter - and, of course, to care for Bryan as his health failed. “I would love to [continue making films] when I’m done being a mum. I’ll get back to it. I don’t know when. Probably when they’re teenagers, solidly 16 or 17-year-olds,” she explained.
Sandra also gushed over her partner’s role in their family, saying: “He’s the example that I would want my children to have... I don’t always agree with him, and he doesn’t always agree with me. But he is an example even when I don’t agree with him.” That example is something the star must be clinging to now as she and her family come to terms with his loss.
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