She had called him “love of my life”. It was in 2021, during an interview on the show Red Table Talk. Sandra Bullock, usually so modest about her love life, couldn’t help but share her happinessarrived without warning this day of January 2015, when the photographer Bryan Randall had come to immortalize the birthday party of his son Louis.
Love at first sight had been almost immediate between the Oscar-winning actress and the ex-model, and the latter had never left her. Until that terrible August 5, 2023 when, as his family announced in a press release, “Bryan is deceased peacefully after a three-year battle with ALS.” Nobody, except his very close entourage, was aware of the terrible disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – called Charcot’s disease in France – from which Sandra’s companion suffered. But in his fightshe always stayed by his side.
His career on hold for him
©Bestimage – They had loved each other for eight years already… until death parted them.
“He had the best of caretakers in the person of my wonderful sister and the nurses she gathered and helped care for him in their home,” noted on Instagram Gesine Bullock-Prado, the youngest of the brunette, in a tribute to her almost brother-in-law. In 2017, the couple had thus exchanged informal vows in the Bahamas, in front of a few relatives… But there was no question of formalizing it with a “real” marriage. “I don’t need a paper to be a devoted partner. I shouldn’t be told to be there in difficult times.”, explained Sandra in 2021. Words that take on their full meaning today: Bryan had already been sick for several months, she knew it and supported him day after day. A year later, in March 2022, she put her career on hold, officially to devote herself to the children she adopted, Louis, born in 2010, and Laila, in 2012.
Unofficially, she wanted to be at the bedside of the one who had made her believe in love again, after a bloody divorce. Five years before their meeting, the superstar indeed collapsed when he learned in the press that Jesse James, the mechanic turned TV presenter whom she had married in 2005, had cheated on her several times, with strippers and disguised as an officer. Nazi! Thanks to Bryan, the 59-year-old star had forgotten the betrayal and the humiliations. “He is the example that I would like for my children”, she said of her lover who was the father of a grown-up daughter. Inconsolable, the actress Speed knows it now: only time will do its work and perhaps lessen his grief.
Louise Monteil