The year of celebrity breakups continues, with news that Meryl Streep and Don Gummer have separated after 45 years of marriage.
While the split might come as a shock to fans of the Oscar-winning actress, 74, it turns out the couple have had more than a little time to mull it over, with the duo actually calling it quits around 2017.
A spokesperson for the couple told Page Six, “Don Gummer and Meryl Streep have been separated for more than six years, and while they will always care for each other, they have chosen lives apart.”
Streep and Gummer, a sculptor, 76, made their last public appearance as a couple in 2018, at the Academy Awards. Since then, Streep has continued to wear her wedding band, spotted sporting the jewellery as recently as last week, when she attended the Princesa de Asturias Awards in northwest Spain, per Vanity Fair.
The pair share four adult children: Henry Wolfe, 43, Mamie Gummer, 40, Grace Gummer, 37, and Louisa Jacobson, 30, as well as five grandchildren.
Perhaps related to their split, Streep purchased a mid-century home in Pasadena in 2017, and the couple sold their Tribeca penthouse three years later, in 2020. According to Vanity Fair, the 3,950-square-foot property was sold for a steeply discounted $15.8 million, after they struggled to sell it for over a year.
While Streep has kept much of her relationship out of the public eye, in 2002, she told Vogue the secret to a good marriage was “Goodwill and willingness to bend — and to shut up every once in a while.”
She added, “There’s no road map on how to raise a family: It’s always an enormous negotiation. But I have a holistic need to work and to have huge ties of love in my life.”
Years later, in 2017, Streep thanked her spouse while accepting the Oscar for Best Actress, for her leading role in The Iron Lady.
“First, I’m going to thank Don because when you thank your husband at the end of the speech, they play him out with music,” she said.
“I want him to know that everything I value most in our lives you’ve given me.”
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