GEORGE LOPEZ - BULLOCK IS LOPEZ'S 'GUARDIAN ANGEL'

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."