LOS ANGELES — It was probably inevitable that Shonda Rhimes would create “Grey's Anatomy,” ABC'... ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Creator Fin | Asian sex
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LOS ANGELES — It was probably inevitable that Shonda Rhimes would create “Grey's Anatomy,” ABC'... ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Creator Fin

LOS ANGELES — It was probably inevitable that Shonda Rhimes would create “Grey's Anatomy,” ABC's runaway hit about the romantic entanglements and complicated lives of surgeons and their overworked interns at a Seattle hospital. For two years during high school, she worked as a candy striper.

A scene from Thurday night’s episode of "Grey’s Anatomy" with, from left, Sara Ramirez, Chandra Wilson, T. R. Knight and Ellen Pompeo.

Apparently Ms. Rhimes is not the only one. Her show's mixture of medicine, drama and sex has proved such a winning formula that more than 25 million viewers tuned in last week to watch its season premiere.

At her office in the residential Los Feliz neighborhood, where lawns are perfectly manicured and homes are tastefully understated, Ms. Rhimes, 36, sat in front of a computer tweaking a script for a future episode. Posters of some of the films Ms. Rhimes had written before coming to television hung on the walls: “Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement”; “Crossroads,” a coming-of-age movie starring Britney Spears ; and the television biopic “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,” which won Halle Berry both an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

Ms. Rhimes admitted that she was a bit surprised by the popularity of “Grey's Anatomy,” which revolves around a surgical intern, Meredith Grey (played by Ellen Pompeo), and her on-again off-again love affair with Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey ), a neurosurgeon nicknamed Dr. McDreamy.

Growing up the youngest of six children in Chicago, Ms. Rhimes said, she preferred reading books to watching television. Her mother, a professor of education administration at DePaul University , and her father, an administrator at Ohio State University , encouraged her to read anything on the family's bookshelf. “I read everything from Nancy Drew and ‘Secret Garden' to ‘The French Lieutenant's Woman' when I was 10,” Ms. Rhimes said.

She graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in English literature and creative writing and landed a job in advertising. After a year she decided she hated it and enrolled in film school at the University of Southern California .

“I loved it immediately,” she said. “I discovered that this is what I wanted to do.” In the mid-to-late 90's, she sold her first screenplay, “Human Seeking Same,” about a couple who fall in love through the personal ads. The movie was never made, but the mid-six-figure check she received made it possible for her to write full time.

In 2002 she wrote a script for a television series that followed the lives of a group of war correspondents; it was not picked up. “They drank a lot and had a lot of sex, and the war was always sort of secondary,” she said, “so when we suddenly went to war, it seemed in poor taste to have a show about people having fun covering war.” Ms. Rhimes said she was in the process of reviving the project.

She is fiercely protective of her show's plot points, refusing to divulge any details about the new season. Will Meredith end up with McDreamy for good?

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admin – Thu, 2006 – 09 – 28 11:00