Speeding Star Sandra Bullock Drives Into Fast Lane Of Her Acting Career

It should have been Sandra Bullock’s moment of triumph, her victory lap.

“Speed” had just opened in the United States to blockbuster grosses. She was fresh from basking in the adoration of the foreign news media during a European tour.

Now she and a friend were taking advantage of her time abroad to see the sights.

But what Bullock was looking at was the bathroom floor of her hotel room in Copenhagen, Denmark, and what she was doing was dampening it with tears.

“I felt horrible,” she confesses.

The reason was the breakup of her four-year relationship with actor Tate Donovan, her co-star on a throwaway 1992 comedy, “Love Potion No. 9.”

The decision to part was mutual, Bullock says, but far from easy. “He’s the greatest human being I ever met,” she sighs. “I don’t think I’ll ever find anybody that fits me like he does. It’s very, very, very sad.”

The best of times, the worst of times - Bullock figures fate doled them out to her simultaneously last summer to maintain some sort of equilibrium, to temper the euphoria and cushion the pain.

She also figures there was another reason, and “While You Were Sleeping,” which opened Friday, may be it.

If “Speed” gave her the clout to play the lead, which was once pegged for Demi Moore, heartbreak gave her the insight.

She says that before last summer, she wouldn’t have been able to connect with her character, Lucy, whose loneliness leads her to pose as the girlfriend of a man in a coma and trick his family into embracing her.

The young woman who sat weeping on a bathroom floor in Copenhagen, however, understood Lucy perfectly.

“I totally got where she was coming from,” Bullock says. “I felt really blue, and this let me exercise it.”

Last year was a time of enormous transition for Bullock, 28, on both personal and professional fronts. This year will tell how well she emerged from it.

First there’s “While You Were Sleeping,” which co-stars Bill Pullman and Peter Gallagher and arrives on the heels of an irresistible TV commercial and positive advance word.

Then there’s “The Net,” a thriller with Dennis Miller that concludes production this week. It should be released in the fall.

Bullock was one of the small group of performers who entered 1994 without much face or name recognition and exited with plenty of both.

Her reported $1.2 million paychecks each for “While You Were Sleeping” and “The Net” are proof of that. So is her presence in the long line of women on the foldout cover of this month’s Vanity Fair.

She stands beside Uma Thurman, Nicole Kidman and Sarah Jessica Parker, among others. With her fetchingly oversized features, shy smile and teardrop-shaped face, she outshines just about every one of them.

She’s only about 10 times more charming in person.

“Oh, my God, you have to hear this CD!” she squeals to her interviewer, as if he’s a fellow college student with whom she is swapping secrets and musical passions (Des’ree’s “I Ain’t Movin”’) in a dormitory room late at night.

The actual setting is her trailer on the Chicago set of “While You Were Sleeping,” and crew members are yelling that she must be ready for a scene in minutes. She reassures them, then turns up the volume on her boom box.

“I want you to listen to this song while I’m getting dressed,” she says, eliciting a look of bafflement and panic on her new acquaintance’s face. “Don’t worry! I’m not going to get naked in front of you!”

She slips behind a partition.

Bullock has yet to learn the reserve of a major star, which she is on the edge of becoming. Will “While You Were Sleeping” put her over the line?

“She’s going to surprise people with this movie,” predicts coproducer Charles Schlissel. “This is a meatier role for her, with more emotional range. She’s carrying the movie. She’s not just reacting to the guys.”

Those guys have included Kiefer Sutherland in “The Vanishing,” Sylvester Stallone in “Demolition Man,” and, of course, Keanu Reeves in “Speed.”

Bullock grew up both in Nuremberg, Germany, and around Washington, D.C., to a German mother and American father whose meeting ground and common passion was opera. Her mother sang it. Her father taught it.

When she told them she wanted to act, they pushed her toward a formal school of the arts. She elected to attend East Carolina University instead, because she wanted what she felt would be a more normal college experience.

Upon graduation, she packed her car and drove to New York City to pay her dues the usual way: waiting tables, heading out to open auditions.

Her break was an off-Broadway production that drew good reviews and the attention of an agent.

In 1989, she won parts in two TV movies, “The Preppy Murder” and “The Bionic Showdown,” and moved to Los Angeles. The next year, she won the title role in a short-lived TV series based on the movie “Working Girl.”

Theatrical movies followed - first “Love Potion No. 9,” then “The Vanishing,” then a country-western flick, “The Thing Called Love,” that did a thing called flop.

Her co-stars on that last project were Samantha Mathis, who became a close friend, and River Phoenix, who later died of a drug overdose.

On the set, she’s a chatterbox and a cutup - always jesting, never seriously complaining.

The director, Jon Turteltaub, nudges her at one point, and she cries out, “Do I have witnesses? I’m being abused!”

Turteltaub’s parents have stopped by to visit the production. Meeting his mother, Bullock says, “You have a wonderful son. He’s a wonderful director.”

Then she turns to Turteltaub and asks, “Did I do good?”

Later, she rushes up to Schlissel as he’s talking about her and whispers softly in his ear.

“She has a great personality and is a terrific worker,” Schlissel says with hammy emphasis, as if following a script. “I think I just got a free dinner out of that.”

Bullock cackles and zooms away.

She says the best dividend of success is helping and hiring friends.

“My best friend from college needed a job, so I said, ‘Come with me,”’ she says. “I started a production company. He’s reading all my scripts. He’s helping assist me in my daily life.”

She says the last sentence in a tone of disbelief - she still finds it incredible that her career has become so complicated.

She helped another friend from her New York days by bringing his screenplay, “Kate and Leopold,” to her agent and saying “This guy has got something - you should represent him.”

It was later purchased by Miramax and could go into production late this year or early next year with Bullock in the role of a scientist dealing with an 18th-century English nobleman who winds up in modern-day Manhattan.

Sometime between now and then, she vows, she will take a break. Just as that booby trap she steered in “Speed” couldn’t go below 50 miles per hour, she can’t seem to slow her life down, either.

That’s partly good, she says. It’s taken her mind off her sorrow.

“If I allow myself to wallow in it too much,” she says, “I’ll look back and say, ‘Why did I waste time grieving?”’

Still, she needs a breather. She’s got yet another movie to make early this summer, and then plans to rent a huge recreational vehicle with a bunch of friends, including Mathis, and bop around the United States.

She jokes about getting tinted windows, because she imagines that anyone who saw “Speed” might swerve off the road if they spotted her driving.

Driving is a theme in her life: When she was a little girl, her mother used to tell her, “Heed how a man drives with you with in a car, because that’s how he’ll drive with you through life.”

Right now, she’s chauffeuring herself. She’s not ready to cede or share control again.

“There are very few people that I trust - very few,” she says, adding that she also has trouble sensing men’s interest. “A person needs to come up to me with a big billboard: I Like You.”

When she scurries away to get dressed for her scene, the first song on the Des’ree disc - which she says she listens to every morning upon waking - begins.

It’s called “You Gotta Be,” and its lyrics are revealing:

“Lovers - they may cause you tears. Go ahead, release your fears. Stand up and be counted - don’t be ashamed to cry …

“You gotta be hard, you gotta be tough, you gotta be stronger.”

Bullock’s working at that.

From the looks of things, she’s doing an admirable job.