For 20 years, the star of Grey’s Anatomy has rarely worked elsewhere. For a new series, about an adoption gone very wrong, she changes out of her scrubs. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ellen Pompeo stood in a room of Picassos, mostly in the cubist style.
She paused in front of a portrait of a woman in a blue dress. The eyes were at strange angles, the mouth tucked to one side. The nose was somehow everywhere.
Pompeo, 55, tilted her head, trying to resolve the features into one coherent face. Then she gave up. “There’s three sides to every story,” she said.
“Or six sides. Or nine. That is why art keeps us alive: Because everybody gets to see things their way, to make sense of them.
” For a long time, Pompeo’s Hollywood story has been a simple one, the perspective fixed. She modelled sporadically throughout her 20s, had a starring role in one film and smaller parts in others. Since 2005 she has led the most popular medical show of the post- ER era, ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy .
Pompeo plays surgeon Meredith Grey, a sturdy moral centre in a fervid, ethically uncertain world. In the intervening years, barring a handful of crossover episodes on S tation 19 , a Grey’s sister show, Pompeo has amassed few other credits – a Doc McStuffins voice-over here, an appearance in a Taylor Swift video there. It wasn’t that she lacked artistic ambitions, but the Grey’s schedule was punishing and spending her brief hiatus making movies felt irresponsible, especially a.
