The Grey's Anatomy actress is starring in the drama Good American Family about an adoption gone wrong

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.

- Alexis Soloski

LOS ANGELES - 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.

The 55-year-old American actress tilted her head, trying to resolve the features into one coherent face. Then she gave up.

"There're 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 modeled 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 (1994 to 2009) era, ABC's Grey's Anatomy. She plays surgeon Meredith Grey, a sturdy moral center in a fervid, ethically uncertain world.

In the intervening years, barring a handful of crossover episodes on Station 19 (2018 to 2024), a Grey's sister show, Pompeo has amassed few other credits.

BOXED IN BY SUCCESSIt was not that she lacked artistic ambitions, but the Grey's schedule was punishing and spending her brief hiatus making movies felt irresponsible, especially after she became a mother. She and her husband Chris Ivery, who works in marketing, have three children.