When she was 4, Ellen Pompeo's mum died from an overdose. For years, she was "full of resentment".

Some actors are driven by creative challenges, by a need to leap from role to role, stretching their skills and boundaries. Ellen Pompeo just isn't one of them.

Only last week the 53-year-old announced she would be stepping away from medical drama Grey's Anatomy after 19 seasons and more than 400 episodes — the kind of tenure rarely seen in the fickle world of prime time television. 

As the lead and member of the founding cast, Pompeo negotiated her way to a reported US$19 million per season in salary and syndication profits. She's always been frank about the fact that it was a "conscious decision" to "chase money" rather than creative fulfilment in her career. Because, she has said, it afforded her something lacking from her childhood.

Stability and security.

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"I made choices to stay on the show," she once told the podcast Jemele Hill is Unbothered. "For me, personally, a healthy home life was more important than career. 

"I didn’t grow up with a particularly happy childhood. So the idea that I have this great husband and these three beautiful children [and] a happy home life was really something I needed to complete, to close the hole in my heart."

That hole was punched almost five decades ago by the death of her mother. 

Ellen Pompeo's difficult childhood. 

The youngest of five children, Ellen Pompeo was raised just north of the U.S. city of Boston in an Irish-Italian Catholic family.

She was just four years old when her mother, aged 39, died of an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers. Seeing her mother dead is the first memory of Pompeo's life.

Most of what she knows about her mother today is through stories. Stories she had to prompt her family to tell. 

"When people tell me stories it was very, very painful for everybody involved," she told the Armchair Expert podcast in 2020.

"There's a story about my mother — she was psychic supposedly — sitting around a table with her brother and sister. I think they were eating dinner or something. I think they said, 'It's going to be your fortieth birthday next.' And the story was told to me that she shook her head, like she wouldn't make it to forty."

The actor said that her mother lived with addiction, one which supposedly began following a major accident at 16.

"She was hit by a drunk driver and thrown 90 feet in the air and pretty much broke every bone in her body. She was in the hospital for almost a year, I think," Pompeo said.

"When she got out she had chronic back pain. She had three slipped disks, and pain management was what the system gave her."

Despite the trauma inflicted upon the family by her mother's death, Pompeo said they spoke little of it. 

"We were completely repressed," she told Allure in 2006. "I wasn’t ever allowed to deal with it. I had to sort of figure it out for myself."

Her father remarried just nine months later to a mother of one (an event Pompeo has described as "really devastating" at the time), and the shape of her family shifted yet again. 

Listen: The Spill team discuss Ellen Pompeo's departure from Grey's Anatomy.

As a teenager, the grief and instability bred resentment towards her mother.

"I was super angry at her for leaving. Not understanding addiction, not understanding pain, not understanding any of that, just coming from a completely ignorant place," Pompeo told Armchair Expert.

But as the years passed, the actor came to appreciate the nuances of her mother's illness, the limited mental health resources that would have been available to her in the 1970s, how the demands of parenting five children would have kept her from accessing them. And her anger gave way to compassion.

"What would she have been able to accomplish had the circumstances in her life been different?" Pompeo said.

The tragedy still lives with Pompeo, just in different ways. Milestones, like her 40th birthday, pass with the knowledge that her mother never reached them, and she's become fixated on mortality. 

"A psychiatrist would have a field day with this shit. It's, like, thinking that I'm going to die when my kids are four," she told Armchair Expert. "I have that thing too. 

"Of course, I kind of am obsessed with death. I think about it all the time. I think about my own death all the time."

Feature image: Getty.

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