Ellen Pompeo’s Earliest Memory Is Tragic and Related to Her Siblings

Ellen Pompeo has been a prominent part of the TV industry since the early 2000s. 

She is best known for her role as Dr. Meredith Grey in the medical drama Grey's Anatomy, which she has been starring in since 2005. She has also reprised her role for Grey's Anatomy's spinoff, Station 19. 

She has been critically acclaimed for the series and is also one of the world's highest-paid actors. As a result, Pompeo has a massive net worth. 

According to Celebrity Net Worth, her net worth is $80 million, and she earns around $550,000 per episode of Grey's Anatomy. But, while she lives a good life with an amazing husband, Chris Ivery, and kids, life was not easy for her. 

Ellen Pompeo and Her Siblings

Pompeo had a tragic childhood. In an interview with Good Housekeeping, she said her "life started out with tragedy." She is the youngest among the six Pompeo siblings, and the sibling before her is at least eight years older than her. 

Tragedy struck the Pompeo family when she was five. Her mother suffered from a fatal overdose of painkillers.

Her earliest memory of her life is when one of her older siblings tried to revive their mother. But, unfortunately, it did not work, and the six Pompeo kids were left without a mom.

The effect of her mother's death started reflecting on the actress's personality. She became "pathetically insecure" since she did not have a mom to encourage and support her. 

Her mother's death hit hard on every member of her family. She summed up her childhood to Playboy (via Chicago Tribune), saying her siblings "were smoking pot and watching The Three Stooges," and she was sent to various babysitters and relatives. 

In an interview with Telegraph (via TV Fanatic), Pompeo confessed things got hard after her father remarried. She went little into details about her stepmother but said it was "quite a bad situation for all the children."

Pompeo spent most of her time with her mother's siblings. One of her aunts, Sister Maureen, was a nun, so she spent time in Convent while another lived in New York, so she got to visit the theater. 

Going to the theater made her realize she wanted to get involved in the acting industry. Slowly, she pulled herself up from her tragic childhood, and when she was 19, she moved to Miami to pursue her dream. 

She worked as a cocktail waitress, but she did not let anyone push her over. Instead, she was strict with the customer and ensured that she would not serve them until they paid her well. 

After a while, she moved back to New York, working in a bar again. There, an agent approached her and helped her book commercial roles. 

And the rest is history.