Latino comedian George Lopez has credited actress Sandra Bullock for
saving him from an early death.
The funnyman reveals he was guzzling alcohol during a lean time in the
mid-1990s when Bullock gave him the opportunity to star in his own TV
show.
Bullock went on to produce the U.S. sitcom, The George Lopez Show,
which helped turn Lopez's fortunes around - and now he considers her his
"guardian angel".
Lopez says, "I grew up where you could visually see people wasting
their lives and the pattern was kind of laid out for me for drinking your
life away or not believing what you could do.
"I hit a hard time in the mid-90s, where I was self abusing with
alcohol and then Sandra Bullock turned that around.
"She was my guardian angel, definitely. I'd lived unhealthy and I
just kind of accepted the way I felt and kind of adjusted to the fact that
I was deteriorating from the time I was a kid at 18, through my 20s and
30s.
"I didn't want to become what the people I grew up with had
become, which was abusing the system, using excuses for not succeeding,
living off the state and raising these kids who had no respect for
anybody."