Showing posts with label pictures: photoshoots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pictures: photoshoots. Show all posts
Nov 4, 2007
Oct 14, 2007
Ellen Pompeo Strikes A Pose For A Worthy Cause
Oct 9, 2007
Sep 10, 2007
LA Confidential Magazine - Emmy/Fall 2007 issue
If Ellen Pompeo had to write an essay along the lines of “What I Did on My Summer Vacation,” it would probably be about the globe-trotting she’s done—New York, Paris, Japan—in the weeks leading up to the filming of the fourth season of her hit ABC show, Grey’s Anatomy. It’s been a wild ride for the 37-year-old Boston native, who got engaged in November to fellow Bostonian Chris Ivery. Pompeo first made a blip on the entertainment radar in 2002 as Jake Gyllenhaal’s love interest in Moonlight Mile, alongside Hollywood heavyweights Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon. She popped up again here and there in mostly forgettable roles (usually cast as the stereotypical wife or girlfriend) in memorable movies like Old School and Catch Me If You Can. But in 2005, Grey’s Anatomy suddenly thrust her fully into the spotlight and onto small screens across America. Pompeo shines as the romantically challenged Meredith Grey, whose sexual exploits and professional struggles are chronicled in excruciating detail each week, much to the delight of the show’s 25 million-plus loyal viewers who keep tuning in to ogle Grey’s McLoveInterest du jour. Unlike her character, however, Pompeo is anything but indecisive. Full of opinions on everything from young Hollywood to the media’s choice of topics, Pompeo calls it like she sees it, refreshing in a town where honesty is rarely the best policy. “I just think the media should take this country in a different direction. We’re so focused on the wrong things,” she says. “We’re teaching young girls that this is what they should be focusing on: rich and famous girls who are rich and famous for nothing. What are we doing to this younger generation? It’s not very responsible.” Los Angeles Confidential: You’ve been traveling a lot during your hiatus. Is that how you typically spend your time off? LAC: And planning your wedding? When will you fit that in? LAC: A lot of TV actors make movies while they’re on hiatus. You started out in film; do you still have an interest in that? LAC: You’re contracted for six seasons, right? LAC: On that topic, during the Isaiah Washington controversy you seemed to steer clear of making any substantive comment on his being fired from the show. Is that because you feel there’s not much for you to say? LAC: Another thing that’s been done to death in your past interviews is this obsession with your weight. Why do you think people care so much? LAC: Why is it so hard for people to wrap their heads around the fact that some women are naturally thin? LAC: Do you have any interest in having children of your own someday? LAC: So after your travels you immediately start work on season four. What would you like to see happen to Meredith this year? Last season was kind of bananas… LAC: When did you realize Grey’s was a hit? Was it clear to you from the minute you got the script? LAC: You’ve been nominated for a Golden Globe before. What’s your take on awards shows? LAC: Speaking of saving lives, now that you’ve been doing the show for a while, do you think you could perform a real-life medical procedure if you had to? LAC: Have you given any thought as to who you’ll be wearing to the Emmys? LAC: Well, it’s always better to be comfortable at these things.
Just what the doctor ordered: a candid conversation with Ellen Pompeo, who’s every bit as outspoken as she is stylish.
Ellen Pompeo: I think it’s important as an actor to get away and experience different cultures. It enriches you. I’m fortunate that the show’s in so many different countries and that they’re nice enough to invite us [to visit]. They treat us so wonderfully. You know, I spend 10 months of the year in Los Angeles, acting. So I think it’s really important to travel and have rich real-life experiences to bring to my acting when I come back to the show. Your whole life can’t be about work or Hollywood.
EP: Oh my goodness. I swear we’re going to get married at some time. We’re just trying to fit it all in. It won’t be a big ceremony—we want one thing to ourselves.
EP: Certainly, and I get a lot of very interesting offers from some pretty remarkable people, but I can’t take advantage of them because the show doesn’t let me. I’m lucky the show is so successful: I never have to do another movie I’m not proud of. I can be super, super picky. So unless it’s an A-list director and an A-list script, and an A-list cast, I don’t really have the desire to be in movies just to prove that I can. I know I can, because I came from movies.
EP: Yes, although I just signed on for a seventh. The show could end tomorrow, but if they want me for seven seasons, I have to oblige. I’ve committed to them. They can let us go anytime they want, but we can’t leave anytime we want.
EP: I think so. It’s better to not exacerbate it. I think everybody’s tired of it. For me, what’s important is to move forward, do whatever I can personally to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.
EP: I guess it’s a normal question from the media because I’m really thin. The dangerous thing about it is that I get a ton of fan mail from little girls—from seven years old to 16—about how they love me and I’m a role model for them. And I think the media is really irresponsible in portraying me as having an eating disorder. I just worry about the girls who look up to me—I don’t want them to think I starve myself or don’t eat, and that to be like me that’s what they have to do.
EP: You know what’s funny? I understand if you see a picture of someone who was 40 pounds heavier three years before; then the weight loss is very dramatic and obvious. But you’ll never find a picture of me where I’m a lot heavier than I am now. I’ve only ever fluctuated two to three pounds in my whole [adult] life.
EP: I do. I do. With the show, I just don’t know if it’s entirely fair to myself and to everybody else right now. We’ll see what happens.
EP: [Laughs] Yeah, it was! I’m much better off not having any expectations. The reality is that I have to be very Zen about it because I have absolutely no control over what they do. I’m just happy to have a job and I love my job, and I love the people I work with. Whatever happens, it’s OK. It’s not a bad way to make a living.
EP: It was two years in, when I got invited to do the Oprah Winfrey Show. I thought, OK, well, this has clearly gone to another level now.
EP: Of course it’s nice to be nominated. I don’t live or die by it, but it’s very flattering. To be nominated would be a nice compliment. There are fantastic actresses in this category every year. But at end of the day, we’re not saving lives. We’re just actors.
EP: [Laughs] Absolutely not! But I could call 911 very well.
EP: No, I haven’t, but I know I’ll be wearing something a lot lighter than last year. I’d just gotten back from the Dior couture show in Paris and I wore this beautiful velvet dress that John [Galliano] gave me. And it was gorgeous, but it was so hot.
EP: [Laughs] Yeah, it is, but it’s kind of impossible. There’s no such thing as a comfortable gown. H
LA Confidential outtakes
Source: la-confidential, larafan21
Aug 19, 2007
Stella - The Telegraph UK interview
Her publicist is mouthing that we have to finish. 'I love the architecture round here,' Pompeo says, getting up. 'It reminds me of my home town.' I catch sight of her in the next room as I leave. She looks different now, 17 again, a sprite, a slip of a thing, in her teenage black wardrobe. 'I took a sleeping pill last night, which I don't usually do, because my body is too little to take it, and this morning I was all over the place,' she exclaims, seeing me looking at her outfit. 'I could hardly manage to dress!' 
UP POMPEO
So long the underdog, Ellen Pompeo has finally hit the big time as the star of the award-winning drama 'Grey's Anatomy'. The product of a desperately tough childhood - and now the '12th most powerful' celebrity in the world - she tells Marianne Macdonald how it all came good
The dark back office of a Georgian house in Bloomsbury is an incongruous place to be interviewing Ellen Pompeo. But that's where we've retreated after her photo-shoot is over. It's a far cry from the sun-baked Los Angeles lot where Pompeo is usually to be found, in scrubs, as the title character in Grey's Anatomy. Dr Meredith Grey - brisk, vulnerable, self-destructive, talented - is a lead unlike any other on American television, and her gripping screen presence and romantic 'car crashes' hook 20 million viewers a week.
In its annual 'Celebrity 100' power list the business magazine Forbes ranked Pompeo and her co-stars at number 12 this year, while the Desperate Housewives cast languished at number 47. Yet here in Britain, where the drama is the main draw on the digital channel Living with reruns on Five, Pompeo is hardly a household name.
Male critics have sniffed at the 'vapid' scripts and 'mawkish' acting in the drama about five trainee surgeons at a Seattle hospital. But Pompeo's portrayal of a woman totally competent in her work and an utter disaster in her relationships has forced even veteran Hollywood producers to examine how a lead who is such a mess - prone to getting drunk in bars and picking up strangers - can prove so compelling.
The tabloids, for their part, have focused on Pompeo's weight (supposedly anorexic), behaviour on set (supposedly a diva) and, since her November engagement, the colourful past of her fiancé Chris Ivery, a record producer, and the size of the ring he has given her. This, a dazzling oblong diamond, has caused Pompeo so much angst that she is even now twisting it off her tiny hand. 'Completely garish, isn't it?' she asks in her little, clear voice. 'He got it in Beverly Hills and spent his entire life savings, which I could kill him for. I was very mad about it. Some days I really love it, and some days I just want to sell it and give the money to charity. All the magazines care about is the size. I think, "Oh, it's absolute rubbish and I'd like to throw the ring in the sewer."' She looks at me wryly. 'I know! How fortunate of me to sit here with this giant rock when there are babies in Africa fighting for their lives.' She has gone from making no money to making great money. How does that feel? 'I feel guilty.' She gives a high, truthful laugh of embarrassment. 'I feel guilty!'
Like so many Hollywood stars Pompeo is small and fragile. Her hand, when I shake it, is like a bunch of twigs and her muscled arms are as tiny as a child's. She is wearing a black sleeveless cotton dress over thin black leggings and Lanvin ballet flats, and in person looks completely different from on screen - younger and more innocent, a cross between Michelle Pfeiffer and Calista Flockhart. Her long hair is healthy and red, her blue eyes have a tinge of green and she keeps almost constant eye contact in a way that is not at all uncomfortable. Here on her an eight-week hiatus from Grey's, she and Ivery are looking for a London flat to buy, before zipping on to Paris and Tokyo.
She had a sad, difficult childhood as the last of six - she was eight years younger than her nearest sibling - in the blue-collar town of Everett, near Boston, and was four when her mother, Kathleen, died of an overdose of painkillers. Her first memory is of her siblings attempting to revive her. The trauma in this vignette is hair-raising, and she admits, putting her hand to her throat, 'I had a tragedy as a child, obviously, my mother dying, and it sort of… I suppose I describe it as… it sort of left me with a broken heart.' But can you mend a broken heart? 'No, never completely.' Her voice lifts, childishly. 'But that's OK, because it makes me appreciate my life.' Had she found therapy useful with that? 'No, I think my job is therapeutic.
It was quite a tragic thing, all these children having no mother; it was quite difficult on my father,' she continues. 'And then he remarried shortly after my mother died, and, ah, much too soon. It was… quite a bad situation for all the children.' Why, what was her stepmother like? 'Oh, I'd rather not discuss that. So I would go off and stay with various people. I was always being shuffled around. Who could baby-sit me this time? So I would go for the summers and the weekends to my aunt Ellen, who I'm named after, and my uncle Jimmy on the Upper East Side of New York. My uncle Jimmy took me to the theatre. And another of my mother's sisters, Sister Maureen, was a nun and lived in a convent in the Bronx, and I would go stay there often, as well.'
Pompeo says, batting away sympathy, that those 'different experiences' gave her a lot to draw on in her acting. But she also concedes that, 'I was just completely confused. I knew I had a lot of people who loved me. There were a lot of different types of people in my life, and I had all these brothers and sisters who were crazy hippy teenagers, smoking pot in the wild 1970s - rock 'n' roll - and I had my dear, dear grandparents…' Everyone, but no one? She pauses. 'I did… well, you know, I had everybody but the one person I really wanted.'
Her father, Joseph, a tobacco salesman, was a strong character. 'He intimidated everybody. He'd wait at the window and when they dropped me off in front of the house he'd fly out of the door and rip them out of the car by the neck,' she has said, alarmingly, of her teenage dates, but he also told her she could do anything she wanted in life. What she wanted was to act. So the moment she turned 19 she made for Miami, where she got a job as a cocktail waitress. Despite her fragile, feminine appearance, she was no pushover. 'I'd abuse the customers, yell and scream at them and make them wait. If they put money down on the bar and it wasn't enough, I'd go wait on someone else. Pretty soon there would be $20 on the bar,' she once told Playboy. I love that image of you at the bar, I tell her. 'Right!' She laughs with real amusement. 'Well, I don't know if you've seen The Departed, but Boston, my home town, is a corrupt place. I grew up in an Italian-Irish neighbourhood, and there were Irish gangsters and Italian gangsters. It's very much like a modern-day Gangs of New York.'
After two years in Miami she went to New York. But her dream of becoming an actress still seemed 'such a grand thing. I felt so overwhelmed, you know, "How do I figure out how to go about this?"' She was also suffering profoundly from her childhood. 'It's as if the floor beneath you is… as if a board is always going to fall through.'
She was 25 when she got her first break; an acting agent approached her as she was working the bar at the SoHo Kitchen. The agent put Pompeo up for three adverts; she got all three. Then Pompeo landed a part opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in the 2002 film Moonlight Mile. He, by chance, had come up to her in a car park three weeks previously and told her she was 'the most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my entire life'. For her the coincidence was life-changing. 'It sort of hit me that I was being guided,' she says. 'I had sort of spent my twenties up until then looking for some sign of my mother, you know, "Make the chandelier swing and show me that you're with me." And at that point I put my faith in the idea that life gives you signs and, whether it's my mother's spirit or not, I've had too many coincidences in my life for it to be normal.'
Another was the way she met Ivery. They had grown up two miles apart but met only in 2003 when a mutual friend introduced them at a Whole Foods shop in Los Angeles. 'I knew his background and I knew the circle in which he ran and I didn't want anything to do with it,' she admits. 'You think you want to get away from your past and be this completely different person. And then I run into him again two days later and by this time in my life I know that's no accident. I knew he was supposed to be in my life.' He had gone to jail briefly? 'Oh, yes, a couple of times. But most people I knew in Boston did. It was very common, which is why I had to get out.'
Something of Pompeo's childhood vulnerability comes off the pages of her previous interviews and you hope, before you meet her, that Ivery is good news. He drives her to work and visits the set most days; she says they do everything together. 'To know someone - the real them, not the reinvented Hollywood them, with all of their flaws and all of their past - that's a true relationship,' she says. 'I feel very lucky. It's very solid.'
ask what she makes of her character's romantic travails in Grey's Anatomy. 'She has a complete lack of emotional intelligence,' she exclaims. 'I just want to smack some sense into her.' What would she advise her? 'Don't ever beg a man.' (She is referring to the scene where Meredith pleads with her married lover Derek to choose her.) 'He should be begging you!'
What next for Pompeo? Halfway through a six-year lock-in for Grey's, she and Ivery are now trying for children. Does their forthcoming wedding excite her? 'No, I'm not someone to stand on ceremony. That's why I have such a problem with the ring. It is a symbol. Just rather an extravagant one.' She gives another high laugh of embarrassment.
I say it must feel like it's all coming right. She smiles. 'I think so. A friend who I moved to Miami with when I was 16 or 17, he was photographing me back then and said, "You're going to make a great 40-year-old." I didn't know how to take that at 16 or 17, but I never forgot it. Now I feel like the older I get the more I am able to take on.'
Jul 23, 2007
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