.......Unlike most of us, Sarah Michelle Gellar already knows exactly how she plans to ring in the new millennium. "I'll be in Australia with a group of friends," she says exitedly over lunch at a sun-drenched L.A. pasta palace. "We're going to start at the Great Barrier Reef and work our way down to Gold Coast, scuba diving and going through the rain forests." She looks up over her sunglasses and serves up a playful smirk. "You didn't expect me to have an answer for that one, did you?"
.......Not really, but then again, anyone who has managed to get where Gellar is at age 22 must be something of a go-getter. Not only is she the star of her own TV series, the increasingly popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but her movie career is in high gear as well, thanks to hits like Scream 2 and Cruel Intentions. She's also just signed to be a spokeswoman for Maybeline, a perfect choice considering that she's the epitome of young, fun, and natural, sporting jeans and braids. "Hey, I have on two rubber bands that match," she boasts, gesturing to her girlish pigtails. "I had a pink and a green one on this morning."

The Gellar Girls
.......Gellar's journey to the glam star life began when she was just four years old. She was discovered in a Manhatten restaurant by a talent agent who thought she was cute. Her first offers were for commercials, but in no time, she was cast in a TV movie called An Invasion of Privacy.
.......Supporting her every move was Gellar's mother, Rosellen, a teacher who raised her daughter in an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "Everything I am is because of my mom," Gellar says of the woman who shuttled her between auditions, jobs and school. "She's so cute, too. She still cuts out little articles from local papers and brings them to me." Gellar is much less effusive about her father, who divorced her mother when Gellar was 7, describing him as "nonexistant" in her life. Pressed to elaborate, she borrows Keanu Reeves' line in Parenthood: "You need a license to go fishing, you need a license to drive, but any butt-reaming asshole can be a father."
.......So it was the Gellar women against the world. They were soon on the road to conquering it, with lots of jobs for Gellar. Still, balancing her career, school, and a social life wasn't always easy. In seventh grade, when most preteens are bugging their parents for a bigger allowance, Gellar suffered what she calls her biggest devastation when the touring play that was to have been her Broadway debut, Neil Simon's Jake's Women, closed before making it to New York City. When she returned to her school friends, nobody would talk to her-taking off six months in seventh grade can wreak havoc on your social life.
.......High school was a better experience for Gellar, once she settld on the right one. "I started out at LaGuardia," she explains, referring to the Manhattan-based Fame School of the Arts, "and I hated that school. I got beat up pretty much every day and the education wasn't that good. I left,and went to Professional Children's School, which I loved."
.......An overachiever even then, Gellar was a straight-A student, but that didn't keep her from having fun. "Making out in parks is a very big thing to do in high school when you grow up in New York City", she reveals. "There was a playground right near my house, and the swings saw alot of action from me."
.......Not that she wasn't getting plenty of action on-screen at about the same time, playing the conniving Kendall Hart-a character 7 years older than she was-on the daytime soap All My Children. "That was definitely head-trippy to be 16 and to have all these love scenes with a man old enough to be my father. I mean, I was married twice (on the show and I hadn't even graduated from high school yet."

Getting Buffy
.......After finishing high school and amid rumors that she clashed with her TV mom Susan Lucci, Gellar left All My Children to pursue bigger and better things in Hollywood. But even with a daytime Emmy under her arm, she found the doors didn't exactly fly open. "You can be very, very famous in the soap world. Then you go into the real world, as I call it, and nobody knows who you are," explains Gellar, who promised her mother that if she didn't find work within a year, she'd start applying to colleges. "Up until the day I got Buffy, casting directors were still saying, 'Oh, she's not ready; she's too green; she's too soap.'"
.......Though now it's impossible to imagine anyone else as Buffy, at the time Gellar had to jump through hoops to land the part. "On my last audition, I went in and tested. When I came out, they said, 'We need you to read one more time,' and I just broke down and cried," Gellar recalls. "I said, 'I can't do this. You guys are wrecking me.' The casting director basically dragged me back in and everybody started laughing and said, 'Congradulations, you got the role.' Meanwhile, I was still crying and sniveling."
.......As any fan can tell you, the role is a perfect fit. "Buffy's very similar to me when I was growing up," Gellar says, "a child in an adult world, sort of trapped, between the two. Does Buffy go to the prom, or does she save the world from demons? My life was similar-do I go to the slumber party, or do I go to my audition?"

Boob Jobs and Kissing Girlfriends
.......Beyond keeping Gellar in the spotlight, on the covers of magazines, and with plenty of loose change for shopping here and there, Gellar's success on Buffy has also been her ticket to movie roles. Her track record thus far has been heavier on hits than misses, though she was brutally offed in both of her '97 releases; Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer. "Jennifer Love Hewitt and I like to refer to that as I Know What Your Breasts Did Last Summer," she says, joking about the fact that she and her costar spent most of the movie bounding about in skimpy tank tops. "I hated the fried food in North Carolina, where we shot, so I barely ate and I lost an entire cup size. At the end of the shoot, I had to match a scene from the beginning, and I had to wear these silicone squishy thingies, all pushed in and taped to fill me up."
.......Gellar did without the squishy thingies in her two '99 releases, though the first one, the romantic comedy called Simply Irresistible, could have used a boost or two. It seemed to vanish from multiplexes as soon as it arrived.
.......She fared much better in Cruel Intentions, the shockingly naughty teenage reworking of Dangerous Liaisons, in which Gellar turned her Buffy image on it's head, playing a coke-snorting she-devil named Kathryn who promises her studly step-brother that if he succeeds in deflowering the new virgin in town, she'll let him "put it anywhere." Gellar says playing the privileged Kathryn wasn't a huge stretch, since almost all the kids Gellar went to junior high school with in Manhattan had far more money and far less supervision than she did. "I remember all the girls wore these expensive Betsey Johnson dresses," she recalls, "and I couldn't afford them new, so I always bought last season's in the $5.00 bins. When I got All My Children, I went out and bought two dresses from the brand-new section-I was so excited."
.......Cruel Intentions also served up Gellar's first girl-on girl kisswith Zoe, Duncan Jack & Jane star Selma Blair. "I kept thinking, 'I have to kiss guys that I don't want to kiss. At least Selma is a friend, and I know where she's been,'" laughs Gellar. "Afterward, Selma said, 'I was nervous that you would think I was a bad kisser.' I said, 'You weren't nervous about the kiss itself?' She said, 'No. I was just afraid you'd think I suck.'"