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Meryl Streep and her husband, Don Gummer, keep their family life as private as they can, especially when their children were just kids — a lesson that Streep said she learned from none other than Robert Redford.

“Robert Redford taught me that when they were babies: ‘They are not your props.’ I really admired the way he protected his family,” the Oscar winner told Good Housekeeping in 2008. “It’s something I consciously emulated.”

After tying the knot in 1978, Streep and Gummer welcomed four children together: son Henry and daughters Mamie, Grace and Louisa.

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Although Streep is one of the greatest and most awarded actors of all time, the Mamma Mia! star has said that being a parent is her most important — and most difficult — role.

“Mothering. Definitely. Acting — that’s praise, money, fulfillment,” she told The Washington Post when asked if motherhood or acting was harder. “Mothering — they don’t even say, ‘Thank you.’ There’s no comparison to acting. I can’t really call acting work, since it’s secretly so fun.”

In October 2023, Gummer and Streep announced their separation after 45 years of marriage.

“Don Gummer and Meryl Streep have been separated for more than 6 years, and while they will always care for each other, they have chosen lives apart,” a representative for the actress told PEOPLE.

Get to know Streep and Gummer’s four children below.

Henry Wolfe Gummer Henry Wolfe Instagram

Henry Wolfe Gummer is Streep and Gummer’s eldest child, born Nov. 13, 1979, in New York. Henry keeps a significantly lower profile than the rest of his family and didn’t pursue a career in acting past college, dropping out of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts after two years.

Instead, Henry focused on music. He told The New York Daily News, “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.”

Henry has succeeded in his chosen field, with songs appearing on soundtracks to his mother’s movies Julie and Julia and Ricki and the Flash. He told The Daily News that being Streep’s son, while obviously having its advantages, also has some drawbacks.

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“The fact that my mom is who she is can be overshadowing. Sometimes I worry that my story isn’t good enough. Sure, my mom is part of the story and I don’t get pissed when people ask me about her, but I wish I had something that could eclipse that as far as compelling storylines,” he said. “It’s not what I would necessarily choose but it is something I have to accept. There are a certain amount of assumptions that go along with that, which tend to not be fair, like the recognition somehow helps me. But it also hurts because people start to think that I don’t work hard and they don’t take me seriously.”

Henry and his wife Tamryn Gummer, whom he married in 2019, have two children, daughter Ida June Gummer, born in 2020, and son Quinn William Gummer, born in 2022.

Mamie Gummer Frazer Harrison/Getty

Mamie Gummer is Streep and Gummer’s oldest daughter. Born Mary Gummer on Aug. 3, 1983, in New York City, Mamie is an accomplished actress whose first role was actually alongside Streep: She appeared in the 1986 film Heartburn when she was just 20 months old. Mamie played Annie in the film and was credited as Natalie Stern to keep her identity as the megastar’s daughter under wraps.

In her early 20s, Mamie dabbled in modeling and got her first Broadway role in Mr. Marmalade. In an April 2007 interview, she said of her Oscar-winning mama, “At home she’s not Meryl Streep — she’s Mum; she’s great and I love her a lot.”

Following her on-screen appearance as a baby, her next major movie role came in 2006’s The Hoax alongside Richard Gere, followed by the 2007 drama Evening, once more with Streep. They’d appear together yet again in 2015’s Ricki and the Flash. Streep boasted of her on-and-off-screen daughter, “She’s brave and fearless and funny and free. She’s a free talent. It doesn’t have any cover-up — she’s the real deal.”

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Mamie admitted that working with her mother in Ricki and the Flash initially concerned her, as she didn’t want their characters’ tense relationship to hurt her mother’s feelings.

“There’s this one scene where I really was quite eviscerating and I was worried about if my words actually wounded [Streep], but after the first take, I looked over and she just had this big grin on her face, so that was a pleasant surprise,” she recalled.

In addition to her movie roles, Mamie may be best known for her frequent appearances on the small screen, with recurring roles in The Good Wife and spinoff The Good Fight, True Detective, The Right Stuff, Blood of Zeus and her own shortlived series Emily Owens, M.D.

Mamie was the first of Streep’s children to make her a grandmother. She and her then-fiancé (now husband), producer and writer Mehar Sethi, welcomed a baby boy in February 2019. Streep joked to Interview about her new status as a grandma, “I’ve been working like mad for quite a while, so I’m getting ready for my first grandchild. My daughter’s having a baby in February, so I’m going to go out and ruin her life. I specialize in unsolicited advice.”

Mamie was previously married to actor Ben Walker, from whom she split in 2013.

Grace Gummer Craig Barritt/WireImage

Grace Gummer was born in N.Y.C. on May 9, 1986. Like her doppelganger sister, Mamie, Grace is also an actress, with her first role playing a younger version of mom Streep’s character in the 1993 movie House of Spirits. Grace was credited in the project as Jane Grey — like her sister before her, the step was taken to keep her true identity as Streep’s child private.

Grace graduated from Vassar College, her mother’s alma mater, with degrees in art history and Italian, then quickly followed her mom and big sister’s footsteps into acting. She began on stage in The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents, followed by the small screen with Nickelodeon’s Gigantic and a small role in Larry Crowne. In 2012, she played Rachel in Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha, then had a two-episode arc on NBC’s Smash.

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Grace has had an illustrious TV career since, starring in Zero Hour, The Newsroom, American Horror Story, Extant, Mr. Robot, Dr. Death and the upcoming Let the Right One In series.

Despite her celebrity pedigree, Grace appears to eschew the spotlight when she isn’t working. In July 2019, she married musician and actor Tay Straithairn, the son of actor David Straithairn, who appeared as Streep’s husband in the 1994 movie The River Wilds. Tay and Grace separated just a month after marrying and divorced in 2020.

In June 2021, Grace and music producer Mark Ronson confirmed their engagement, and the pair tied the knot on Aug. 8, 2021. In October 2022, PEOPLE confirmed that Grace and Ronson were expecting their first child together after Grace debuted her baby bump at W Magazine’s 50th anniversary party in N.Y.C.

The news that the couple had welcomed a daughter came from Ronson’s sister Annabelle Dexter-Jones.

“[Gummer] just had the baby. She’s two and a half months now,” she told PEOPLE in March 2023, shortly after Grace and Ronson were spotted out for a stroll with their newborn in N.Y.C. “She’s stunning.”

Louisa Jacobson Bruce Glikas/WireImage

Streep and Gummer’s youngest child is daughter Louisa Jacobson, born Louisa Gummer on June 12, 1991, in Los Angeles. Like her mother and older sister Grace, Louisa graduated from Vassar, earning her degree in psychology in 2013. She received a fine arts master’s degree in acting from the Yale School of Drama and attended the British American Drama Academy in Oxford.

Louisa, who uses her middle name as her surname due to Screen Actors Guild rules (there’s another actress out there named Louisa Gummer), got her start in stage plays, including the production of Member of the Wedding alongside Tavi Gevinson in the 2018 Williamstown Theatre Festival. Her screen debut was in the TV movie Gone Hollywood in 2019 with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. Louisa’s breakout came in 2022 with HBO Max’s period drama The Gilded Age, in which she stars as Marian Brook with Christine Baranski, who also acts alongside her sister Mamie in The Good Fight.

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During an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Louisa revealed that her famous mom sometimes gets on her nerves, calling her “Pickle” and asking many questions.

“Even today, she was like, ‘All right, Pickle, is the car coming for you?’ She’s like, ‘Do you have everything you need? Is someone coming to pick you up from the theater?’ ” she recalled. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, Mom. I have it under control.’ She’s like, ‘OK, yeah. Enough from me. Enough from me.’ ”

Noting that her mom is “very sweet,” she added one of Streep’s habits that drives her crazy: “If she starts to speak to someone who has an accent, she’ll just start doing the accent.”