- In case you missed it: Big Little Lies season two just premiered with Meryl Streep as Mary Louise Wright, mother of Perry, Celeste's abusive husband.
- Her splashy appearance may have you wondering what some of her best roles are—and whether or not she's married and has kids.
- In fact, Streep does have four children with husband Don Gummer: Henry Wolfe, 39, Mamie, 35, Grace, 33, and Louisa, 27. Here's everything we know about them.
In the Streep-Gummer household, it's all about artistic expression.
Meryl Streep and her husband of over 40 years, Don Gummer (a celebrated sculptor), are the proud parents of four children—Henry Wolfe, 39, Mamie, 35, Grace, 33, and Louisa, 27—all of whom have followed a creative professional path in some capacity. Streep, winner of eight Golden Globes, three Oscars, and three Emmys, has even inspired two of her children—Mamie and Grace—to pursue acting as a full-time gig. Meanwhile, Louisa, Streep's youngest daughter, is a model with the acting bug, while her son, Henry Wolfe, is a musician.
So what, exactly, do they do? Allow us to peel back the curtain.
First, let's begin with Mamie and Grace, the two children who've made the most red carpet appearances alongside their famous mother. You've likely seen their work on screen and thought there's something indistinguishably familiar about their performances, from their stunning face to the never-without-purpose body language.
Mamie Gummer
Mamie, specifically, made her screen debut playing her mother’s daughter in 1986’s Heartburn alongside Jack Nicholson when she was just 20 months old. To avoid accusations of nepotism, she was credited as Natalie Stern in the film.
Twenty years later, Mamie made her feature film debut with a small role in The Hoax, starring Richard Gere. A year later, in 2007’s Evening, Mamie was given her first starring role as young Lila Wittenborn with her mother playing the present day version. In addition, her first starring role on screen came a year later in 2008’s HBO miniseries John Adams, in which she played Sally Smith Adams, the wife of John Adams’s son, Charles. Over the years, Mamie went on to star in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects, and Jonathan Demme’s Ricki and the Flash.
After starring as the lead in 2011's Off the Map and 2012's Emily Owens, M.D., her TV attempts eventually gave way to her acclaimed performance in True Detective’s 2019 third season, in which she plays Lucy Purcell, the wife of a pair of missing children at the center of the season’s plot.
Grace Gummer
Mamie’s young sister Grace followed in her footsteps not just with acting, but in portraying younger versions of their mother in her films. For Grace, that meant playing the younger version of Streep’s character Clara del Valle in the 1993 film The House of the Spirits.
She made her adult feature film debut in Tom Hanks’s 2011 film, Larry Crowne. That same year, she made her Broadway debut in a revival of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, and went on to win a Theatre World Award for her performance. Eventually, Grace starred in a number of successful television series, including season two of HBO’s The Newsroom, as well as CBS’s Extant opposite Halle Berry and Ryan Murphy’s FX series American Horror Story: Freak Show. Earlier this year, she was tapped for National Geographic’s The Hot Zone with Julianna Margulies and Noah Emmerich.
Louisa Gummer
Louisa Gummer, Meryl’s youngest daughter, is probably best known throughout the modeling world having starred in a campaign for Christian Dior. But don’t think she doesn’t have similar ambitions to her older sisters. According to The Telegraph, she is believed to be wrapping up her final year at Yale School of Drama within their Master of Fine Arts program studying acting.
She’ll need to first play a young Streep in something to not break with family tradition, but from there, if her career is anything like the rest of the Gummers', she’ll find her way towards success.
Henry Wolfe Gummer
While all of the Gummer sisters appear to have caught the acting bug, Streep's son followed a different path in the music industry. Yes, he spent two years studying acting at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, but he eventually dropped out to pursue music.
"For me, music was more stimulating from day to day. It was something that I didn't need to be working on a project to practice. I can do it whenever and I get satisfaction from completing songs that i never really got from acting," he told the New York Daily News in 2011.
After performing with a band called Bravo Silva, he dropped his first solo EP in 2009, performed "Stop the Train" on the Julie & Julia soundtrack, and later released Linda Vista in 2011 and Asilomar in 2015. He decided to drop his last name, too, going just by Henry Wolfe. And in 2015, he also collaborated on the soundtrack for Streep's Ricki and the Flash—which Mamie starred in—with "Stop the Train," according to IMDb.
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