Profile with Pedigree | June 2007

In 'Evening', Focus Features' elegiac adaptation of Susan Minot's best-selling, time-telescoping novel, Hugh Dancy (portraying a doomed 50s New Englad blueblood) confides to co-star Claire Danes, "I fully intend to amount to something despite my advantages." At 23, the radiant and self-possessed Mamie Gummer (cast as Dancy's lovelorn sister, Lila) is already making good on that declaration. Firstborn daughter of Meryl Streep and sculptor Don Gummer, Mamie penetrated all the way to round two of 'Evening's auditions - "She gave a knockout reading," says producer Jeffrey Sharp - before anyone remembered to inform director Lajos Koltai of her pedigree. And months passed before Streep (whose "beak", Mamie says, she has inherited) was recruited to take on the part of Lila as a septuagenarian. "My mother and I talked for a while about her playing an older me," Mamie recalls. "And then she decided, "Fuck it - why not?"

Brought up out of the limelight in pastoral Salisbury, Connecticut, and educated at Northwestern University, the etheral ingenue insists she is much more of a novice than "people assume. I didn't spend my childhood on a movie set. I was away at school! Film is new for me. I'm figuring it out, getting my bearings. I'm still more comfortable onstage" - an inclination validated by her recent nomination for a Lucille Lortel Featured Actress Award, for her electrifying Off Broadway performance last summer in 'The Water's Edge'. "It's been hard to have the focus on me," admits Mamie, whose next project will be HBO's colonial-period epic, 'John Adams' (she will personify the hero's long-suffering daughter-in-law.) But it's getting a little easier, I'm loosing up. And I hope to keep working - maybe until the year 2100!"