‘I want to be around for baby daughter,’ says De Niro, 80
‘Everything that I’m consumed with or worried about just goes away when I look at her’
ROBERT DE NIRO has said he wants “to be around for as long as I can” for his baby daughter, after having a seventh child aged 80.
The actor said it was “great” that he had a child so late in life, but that he did not “know where it’s going to go” with her as she grows up.
De Niro, who recently won a Golden Globe for his performance in Killers of the Flower Moon, shared his thoughts on being an elderly parent with the American Association of Retired Persons yesterday.
“I’m an 80-year-old dad and it’s great,” he said.
“Everything that I’m consumed with or worried about just goes away when I look at her. It’s wondrous.”
He said that nine-month-old Gia had been “observing every little thing”.
He added: “She has a very sweet kind of way of looking at you and just taking you in.”
De Niro had his seventh child last year with girlfriend Tiffany Chen, 45.
The pair met on set while working on the 2015 film The Intern. He played a retiree who decides to go back to work while Chen portrayed his character’s tai chi instructor.
They began a relationship “a couple of years later” after they “got back in touch” with each other, she has previously said.
De Niro has said that much of the “heavy lifting” in raising the child falls on Chen, although she claimed he was “very supportive”. Speaking to The Observer last year, he said that child rearing “doesn’t get easier”.
“It is what it is,” he said. It’s OK. I mean, I don’t do the heavy lifting. I’m there, I support my girlfriend, but she does the work. And we have help, which is important.”
The actor’s advanced age became the subject of a joke by the Golden Globes host Jo Koy earlier this month.
Referencing Gia’s birth, Koy told him: “Man, I swear to God, your last performance is going to be your greatest performance ever.
“How’d you get her pregnant at 80? CGI?”
De Niro has been married twice. He wed actress Diahnne Abbott in 1976 but they divorced in 1988. He then tied the knot with Grace Hightower in 1997. They separated in 2018.