Ellen Pompeo

The first thing Meredith Grey does on screen is wake up on a floor. It is her mother's house, there is a man beside her whose name she has not bothered to learn, and by lunchtime he is Dr Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), telling her what to do at work. Ellen Pompeo plays that morning, and most of the twenty years that follow, as a woman not sure which she is worse at, the job or the man, and she does it by watching rather than reacting. Sandra Oh does the cutting in those early seasons. Pompeo is the one the cuts land on, and the programme needs her still so that everyone else can move.

Then there is the voice. Every episode of Grey's Anatomy closes on a montage under a song, with Pompeo's narration over it drawing the moral. We cried at one of those in the second season and felt a little foolish about it, because we could see how the pieces had been fitted together; what held it was that Pompeo does not sell the line. She reads it as if she is not sure she believes it either, and that doubt makes the sentiment bearable. The same quality carries "The Sound of Silence" (2016), an episode that leaves her with almost nothing to say and asks her face to do the work of fear, despair and, eventually, something like joy.

She did not come from nowhere. There were small television parts in the late 1990s and a handful of films: Moonlight Mile (2002), where her Bertie Knox drew notice for vulnerability and charm, Catch Me If You Can (2002) as Marci, and Daredevil (2003) as Karen Page. The film career went no further than that, and we suspect the reason is the one that made Meredith work. She registers rather than projects, and a supporting part in a studio picture rarely has room for that. Television, with its close-ups, did.

She played Meredith as a series regular through the eighteenth season, then stepped back from the nineteenth while staying on as executive producer and narrator, so the voice remains even when the face does not. In 2017 and 2018 she directed two episodes, "Be Still, My Soul" and "Old Scars, Future Hearts", and by the accounts of those on set she approached them as an actor's director, more interested in what the performers were doing than in the shot list. That fits. Her longest collaborators are Shonda Rhimes, who created the part, and Debbie Allen, who directs and produces alongside her, and both work the way the programme does: the case and the corridor cut against each other, the feeling arriving under the song.

In 2014 she said, "I don't find acting terribly empowering." A decade on, she has moved in the direction she named, fewer hours in scrubs and more behind the camera. Start the programme at the beginning, as we said in our review, and notice how much of it is her standing still while other people talk.