Beautiful People 2007 | March 2007

Mamie Gummer is finding her own way. Sure, she may be Meryl Streep's daughter (her dad is sculptor Don Gummer), but she didn't grow up on movie sets and the delightfully down-to-earth 23-year-old wasn't pressured by Mom to follow in her footsteps or to avoid her path altogether. And though it took Gummer a while to admit that acting was what she really wanted to do, by high school she had fallen into theater and was happily doing "the plays with all the scary kids who dressed in black and touched each other inappropriately." Then, two years ago, right out of college (she studied theater at Northwestern), she landed a part in Mr. Marmalade, an Off-Broadway play by Noah Haidle.

Given that it was her first part after graduating, she says, "It was sort of appropriate to be playing a baby among grown-ups, trying to be a grown-up." Lately, she's been veering more toward screen work, with various projects in the pipeline, including parts in the upcoming films Stop-Loss by Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) and Evening, adapted by Michael Cunningham from the Susan Minot novel and directed by Academy Award-nominee Lajos Koltai. But all the camera work doesn't mean she's forgotten about the stage -- she hopes to continue to do both. She's particularly drawn to new playwrights and new material. As she says, "I don't want to be compared to somebody else's performance; I'm already getting enough of that probably, and I'd like to break into my own thing."