SHE’S the rom-com queen known as Hollywood’s sweetheart – but in real life Sandra Bullock seems destined to never get her happy ending.
Sandra, 59, suffered fresh heartbreak this week with the death of long-time partner Bryan Randall who she had lovingly nursed during his secret battle with ALS, the most common form of motor neurone disease.
Bryan, a photographer, had struggled with the illness for three years before dying on Saturday, age 57.
The family said: “It is with great sadness that we share that on Aug. 5, Bryan Randall passed away peacefully after a three-year battle with ALS.
“Bryan chose early to keep his journey with ALS private and those of us who cared for him did our best to honor his request.
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“We are immensely grateful to the tireless doctors who navigated the landscape of this illness with us and to the astounding nurses who became our room-mates, often sacrificing their own families to be with ours.”
Bryan was meant to be Sandra’s Happy Ever After following the high- profile collapse of her marriage to American TV personality Jesse James, who was revealed to have been cheating on her just as they were adopting a son.
Speaking of her new love in 2021, Miss Congeniality actress Sandra said: “I found the love of my life. It’s the best thing ever.”
Adopted son
Meeting Bryan in 2015 promised a bright new future after things had broken down with Jesse and she was left to raise adopted son Louis alone.
She had married Jesse in 2005, after a four-year relationship in the Nineties with US actor Tate Donovan, and brief flings with Hollywood A-listers Ryan Gosling and Matthew McConaughey.
They had met two years earlier when Sandra took her godson on to the set of biker Jesse’s US telly show Monster Garage, about maverick mechanics transforming vehicles into completely different machines.
He began pursuing Sandra with a “courtship of letters” over email.
She said she was apprehensive at first but his persistence won her over.
“It was not something I wanted, needed, or looked for, but because he was a stronger person than I was, spiritually and on a tolerance level, I was lucky enough he educated me,” she said in a 2006 chat with Vanity Fair mag.
Jesse also gushed about his feelings for Sandra: “She’s beautiful. She’s amazing. She takes my breath away. Sometimes I look at her and I do, I just lose my breath.”
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Sandra was at first not sure about ever wanting to become a mother.
But when she saw the damage done by America’s Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005 in New Orleans, she changed her mind.
She said of her life-changing moment: “Something told me, ‘My child is there’. It was weird.”
Katrina was the States’ most devastating hurricane, resulting in 1,392 deaths and causing damage that was estimated at between $97.4billion and $145.5billion.
Sandra and Jesse began their adoption process in 2006.
But she had to wait four years before she could finally hold her son, Louis, who was born in New Orleans.
She recalled in 2010: “The beautiful thing that I was constantly told was, ‘The perfect child will find you. You will find your child’.
“But you don’t believe that when it’s not happening. When you’re going, ‘Where is my family?’”
The adoption process was still ongoing in March 2010, when Sandra was at the peak of her career.
She had just won an Oscar for Best Actress, following her performance in The Blind Side — a biopic about Michael Oher, a homeless boy who became an American football star with the support of his adoptive mother, played by Sandra.
But her hopes for the future were shattered when several women came forward to say they had had affairs with Jesse.
Tattooed model Michelle “Bomb-shell” McGee, 36, was the first, revealing intimate details of her fling.
She said: “It was kind of weird. He asked me to sit on the couch next to him and watch a movie.
“It was very 12-year-old and he kind of did the whole like reaching around and that’s where he started kissing me.
“It was very awkward.”
Two other women later claimed to have had romantic entanglements with Jesse during his marriage.
Stripper Melissa Smith, 48, told how she had a two-year relationship with him, first hearing from Jesse when he contacted her on MySpace in September 2006, just a year after he had married Sandra.
The busty exotic dancer claimed Jesse never mentioned his wife during their relationship, never wore his wedding ring and called himself Vanilla Gorilla — the same nickname that he used when with Michelle.
Then photographer Brigitte Daguerre, 53, hired by Jesse to work in his fashion and motorcycle store West Coast Choppers, claimed she and him were in contact for a year.
But she said they had sex only four times before she cut off contact, and called him a “dud” in bed.
It was claimed Jesse fired Brigitte from the shop when she refused to continue having sex with him, and she added that Jesse would “kick her out” immediately after sex.
He finally admitted to being unfaithful, saying: “Yeah, I did cheat on my wife, yeah, I stood up and took accountability for it and apologised.
The easy (put down) is like, ‘Oh well you cheated on Sandra Bullock’. In general, both women and men cheat. It’s part of life.”
He checked into rehab in Arizona for sex addiction, but that, and his apologies to Sandra, were not enough to save the marriage.
The couple divorced in June 2010.
Sandra then continued with the adoption as a single mum.
Meanwhile Jesse, after leaving rehab, told People: “The love I have for Louis cannot be put to words.
“Not having him around to love and to hold has left a huge hole in my heart.”
In another interview, on American TV news show Nightline, he admitted telling Sandra “basically everything” after the cheating scandal broke.
But he refused to publicly disclose just how many women he had been involved with.
He said only: “I was unfaithful to my wife and I’m not going to put any kind of count to it.
“Just the fact that I took a perfect marriage and a perfect wife and step-mother and threw it away because of my actions, it doesn’t matter . . . it could’ve been a million (women).
“Bad is bad, no matter what it is.”
Sandra has since described her post-split relationship with Jesse as “a different one, a bittersweet one, one of new understanding, one of forgiveness, one of support for his recovery”.
She briefly dated Captain America actor Chris Evans in 2014, but she was more concerned with focusing on bringing up Louis.
She definitely was not expecting to fall for Bryan when she did.
He had been hired to photograph Louis in January 2015 for his birthday and they quickly fell in love.
At the time Sandra was in the process of adopting a second child, Laila, and found she needed to tell Bryan about it at a very early stage of their relationship.
Talking on Jada Pinkett Smith’s podcast Red Table Talk, about the moment she told him, Sandra said: “I said, ‘Remember that non-disclosure agreement you signed when you photographed my son?’ I said, ‘You know, that still holds’.
“He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘I’m bringing a child home when I come back from Toronto’.
“He was so happy but he was scared. I’m a bulldozer.”
Sandra and Bryan always make sure to keep their relationship extremely private — not even revealing that he had been diagnosed with ALS in 2020, and that she was caring for him.
ALS is a neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. It can cause worsening ability to grip, walk, speak, swallow and breathe.
In December 2021, Sandra spoke movingly about her partner, and what an inspiration he was to her two children, saying it didn’t matter that they weren’t married.
She said: “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.”
The Bird Box actress added: “He’s the example that I would want my children to have.
“I have a partner who’s very Christian and there are two different ways of looking at things, 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.”
While Sandra has not yet publicly paid tribute to her partner, her sister Gesine Bullock-Prado, spoke of him and Sandra last night in a moving statement.
The TV chef said: “I’m convinced that Bry has found the best fishing spot in heaven and is already casting his lure into rushing rivers teaming with salmon.
“ALS is a cruel disease but there is some comfort in knowing that 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.
“Rest in peace, Bryan.”
