Meet Meryl Streep And Don Gummer's 4 Kids

Meryl Streep and Don Gummer are parents to four children: One son and three daughters. Henry, Mamie, Grace, and Louisa are all interesting and talented individuals who, like their parents, have a creative streak. While Streep and Gummer's daughters have followed in their mom's footsteps, their son shares similarities with his sculptor father. "My brother is more like my dad ... more solitary," Mamie Gummer said in 2016, per Irish Independent. "He'll go into his studio and write music all day."

The Gummer kids grew up away from the limelight and were protected from the media. But now, a few of them are willing to open up their lives with the public and share who they are as they make a name for themselves away from their parents' fame. In fact, Louisa even changed her last name to Jacobson to carve her own path in the entertainment world. 

Raising children is no easy task, and Streep has been open and honest about the difficulties of motherhood. When asked whether acting or motherhood was more challenging, the "Mamma Mia!" actor told The Washington Post in a 1998 interview, "Mothering. Definitely." She explained that children "don't even say, 'Thank you.' They don't even clear the table unless you say, 'Excuuuse me.' Real life, there's no comparison to acting." Without further ado, meet Meryl Streep and Don Gummer's adult children.

Henry Wolfe Gummer is Meryl Steep and Don Gummer's eldest child. He was born on November 13, 1979. His talents were apparent early on, as Streep recalled in an interview with Mom in 2016. "I had a child who, at 3, would go to the piano, reach up and play. I said we have to get him music lessons," she said. In the following years, when Henry lost his love of piano and wanted to stop his lessons, his parents let him quit.

However, Streep later realized how valuable perseverance is. "Now, cut to age 35, and he is a musician. Self-taught and late in life, he came to it. I keep thinking if he had stayed with it ... You know, a little bit of 'tiger mom' is a good thing," she said. "Sometimes you have to make them do things they don't want to do."

Though Henry dabbled in acting, he ultimately chose music, which has brought him more joy. "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," he told The New York Daily News (via People). "I can do it whenever, and I get satisfaction from completing songs that I never really got from acting." Still, he loves the performative aspect of being a musician. "Playing music with other people in front of an audience is just fun," he told HuffPost in 2016.

Mamie Gummer is the second child of Meryl Streep and Don Gummer and was born on August 3, 1983. Like her mother, she was also bitten by the acting bug. But following in her mom's footsteps has had its challenges. In a 2008 interview with New York Magazine, Mamie called it "a blessing and a curse. It gets you in the door, but it doesn't get you the role." Mamie made a similar statement in an interview with Vogue in 2016. "It was hard in some ways, because of my background, I received a lot of attention that I had to learn to be comfortable with," she said. 

Mamie has had the chance to star alongside Streep several times, starting as early as the 1986 film "Heartburn" when she was just 20 months old. Both actors were both cast in the 2007 film, "Evening," with Mamie playing a younger version of her mom's character. And though they didn't share any scenes, it wasn't something Streep was sad about. As she told Good Housekeeping in 2008, "Maybe that was for the best." 

As adults, they appeared together in the 2015 film, "Ricki and The Flash." And Streep is incredibly supportive of Mamie and believes she has talent. ​​'She's brave and fearless and funny and free. She's a free talent," Streep said at the "Ricki and the Flash" premiere in 2015, per AZ Central. "It doesn't have any cover-up — she's the real deal.”

Meryl Streep and Don Gummer's third child is Grace Gummer. She was born on May 9, 1986. She has a creative side and is an actor, but she also has a formal education, which her mother pushed for.

"I wanted them to follow their own dreams, but I did ask them to have a plan B," Streep told Working Mother (via HuffPost). "They made their own way. Grace studied art history and Italian, for example. But I was more worried about how their lives would be possibly disrupted or made more complicated by the media attention that now follows every young actor." She added, "I never had to deal with that when I was their age."

Grace attended Vassar, the same school as her mom, and graduated in 2008. Streep graduated back in 1971. "I was interested in theater and drama but didn't consider acting as a post-college pursuit per se," Grace said, per Vassar. "Life was simpler at Vassar. I just studied whatever I wanted and what I was interested in without the idea of it foreshadowing a career path."

Grace Gummer isn't afraid to push boundaries and go outside her comfort zone for an acting performance. One example of this was her appearance in the 2022 horror series, "Let the Right One In." She appears in 10 episodes as the character Claire Logan, a character that she was surprisingly drawn to.

"The horror genre isn't really my thing," she told WWD. "But when I read it, I was like, 'Oh, this is something completely different. It's actually really interesting, and it's a lot deeper, and there's no gratuitous violence in it." She explained, "It feels like it's much more sort of accessible and relatable."

Of course, some roles are more challenging than others, and Grace acknowledges that she can't always just snap out of them. "Putting myself into that dark place is something I have to warm up to do and warm down to get rid of," she told W Magazine in 2022. "It can definitely stay with you in little ways throughout the day when you don't realize." Gummer may be willing to discuss her career openly, but she likes to keep her personal life out of the spotlight. "I don't know that there ever was a decision to be private," she said in an interview with W magazine. "I just tend to be this way."

There is a notable difference in Louisa Jacobson's last name from her siblings', because uses it to set herself apart from her famous family.

"I wanted to forge my own path and try different things," she said in an interview with Into The Gloss on why she didn't immediately start acting. She also explained that facing comparisons with her mom could make her second guess herself. "It's going to be a constant thing throughout my life," Jacobson told Tatler. "It has been since I can remember — this issue of 'Do I deserve what I have?'" Luckily, the actor overcame these feelings of doubt to pursue her dream, and she told the outlet that it was helpful to remember other stars like Jane Fonda and Sofia Coppola had done it before her. The key to moving forward? Avoiding social media. "I think it just takes time and not reading Twitter and just focusing on what I want to achieve as an artist," she said.

Her sister, Mamie Gummer, made similar comments to ABC News in 2015. "I remember trying to kind of fly under the radar when I first got out of school. And I went to general casting meetings, like at soap operas," Mamie said, adding that her mother's fame "does sort of precede every door that I walk into in this way."