FIVE years ago, Sandra Bullock was single, heading for 40 and throwing herself into work and the Oscar- winning ensemble drama Crash.

Today, she’s married, stepmum to her tattooed biker welder husband’s three kids and back on screens in a romantic comedy.

It’s quite a turnaround, especially for an actress who used to believe marriage was a "death sentence". So what changed?

"I had everything I wanted, not realising that maybe I was going after things that weren’t filling me up in the way I wanted to be filled up," she says, candidly, when we meet in a London hotel to discuss her role as an unlikely bride in The Proposal.

"I never felt I was missing anything ever until one day I stopped long enough to smell the roses outside of this little treadmill I had gotten myself onto and I realised there were other things I liked, that I didn’t know.

"I realised I didn’t want certain things in my life that I got rid of and it opened the door to a plethora of other things that entered, but had I not stopped and done the work, I never would have appreciated or seen them."

In short, she fell in love with the right guy.

Sandra met Jesse, apparently a real-life descendent of the American outlaw, and former presenter of the Discovery Channel’s Monster Garage, when she arranged for her godson to meet him for a Christmas present.

They started dating and three months in, she realised he was "the one" – when he lay injured in a hospital bed after a racing accident.

"I always thought marriage meant that someone was going to ask you to stop being who you were and I met someone who not only wants me to be who I am, but likes it," says Sandra, beaming broadly.

"So my life changed in that my views towards marriage stopped being morbid. I found I was ready to be a good partner where I don’t think I was a good partner to people before."

In a bizarre case of art imitating life, Sandra’s character in The Proposal, Margaret, is a workaholic boss, who doesn’t think she needs anything else in her life.

But when the threat of deportation back to her native Canada means losing her job as an editor in a publishing company, she turns to her personal assistant Andrew (Ryan Reynolds) and blackmails him into marrying her.

Andrew reluctantly agrees, on the condition that she flies with him to Alaska to meet his family and celebrate his Grandma Annie’s (Betty White) 90th birthday.

In real life, of course, Sandra is nothing like the hard-nosed, Christian Louboutin-wearing New Yorker Margaret.

Although, she does look immaculate today, in a white and black one-sleeved top, with her long dark hair tucked behind one shoulder to reveal a diamond earring.

And she is the "older woman". While Ryan, married to Scarlet Johansson, is 32, Sandra will be 45 later this month – although she hardly looks a day over 29 – the age she was in her breakthrough role in 1994’s Speed.

As she sucks on boiled sweets and lets out real belly laughs, it is clear she couldn’t be an "evil witch" if she tried.

Through roles in films like Miss Congeniality and Two Weeks Notice, Sandra – Sandy to her friends – became known as the comic actress who could play the girl-next-door, the tomboy and the sexy leading lady.