George Clooney set his own career aside on the Lido to talk about his older sister, Adelia “Ada” Zeidler, who died of cancer at 65 on Friday, December 19, 2025. The Oscar-winning actor and director had collected the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, and came back the following afternoon to speak about her.

The presentation came during the opening ceremony of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, on the stage of the Sala Grande in the Palazzo del Cinema, with his “Jay Kelly” co-star Laura Dern delivering the laudatio. Danny Boyle’s “Ink” premiered afterward, and Ellen Burstyn received a second Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement on September 7. La Biennale di Venezia had announced the award in July.

What He Said Accepting the Award

On the night itself, he opened on his own age. “You know, when they tell you that you’re gonna be getting a lifetime achievement award, there are really two things that come to mind,” he said. “The first is what an incredible honor this is. And then the second is, uh, do they know something that I don’t?”

The speech then turned, and Clooney called out authoritarians. “We’re living through a moment in time where the people in charge and people with the most money are telling us to fear one another,” he said. “Stories are always dangerous to people who peddle in fear.” The first people authoritarians try to shut down, he said, are not politicians but “journalists who ask questions, they’re the artists who refuse simple answers.”

He closed the speech on his children. “By the way, my two kids are the only two people that thought I was good in ‘Batman.’ I haven’t let them see the whole film,” he said, adding, “Don’t watch it til the end, it’s terrible.”

A Hand Held, and a Plea to Seek Joy Out

A day later, on Thursday, September 3, his sister came up at a masterclass in the Match Point Arena on the Lido, moderated by the film critic Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan. “My sister, who I was very close to, got cancer last year and she died very quickly,” Clooney said.

He went on to describe being in the room at the end. “I was with her when she died, and there was this feeling, being with her, holding her hand when she died, understanding how brief all of this is,” he said. “It was minutes ago that she and I were little kids together. Minutes ago we were holding hands as little kids. And now, you know, time goes so fast.”

The two-time Academy Award winner, 65, then handed the room an instruction. “Find joy in the things that make [us] miserable. You have to seek the joy out. You have to demand it, and you have to make sure that you demand it of yourself. That’s it,” he said. He added: “Because look, I don’t know what happens after we die,” he said, adding, “Nobody I know has yet to come back and tell me exactly how it works out.”

In the same festival appearance, Clooney said he had mortgaged his house to pay for “Good Night, and Good Luck.” He also praised his wife, Amal Clooney, and her work through the Clooney Foundation for Justice, calling her “badass,” and he recalled his father’s lessons about challenging the powers that be and supporting the more vulnerable.

What He Said in December

The actor and director had spoken about the loss once before, in a brief statement to People magazine a day after his sister died. “My sister, Ada, was my hero. She faced down cancer with courage and humor. I’ve never met anyone so brave. Amal and I will miss her terribly,” he said on December 20, 2025.

Zeidler died at St. Elizabeth Healthcare in Edgewood, Ky. She is survived by her parents, by her children, Nick Zeidler and Allison Zeidler Herolaga, and by her brother and his wife. Her husband, Norman Zeidler, a retired Army captain, died on October 11, 2004.

A Kentucky Artist Away From the Spotlight

Zeidler was born on May 2, 1960, in Los Angeles, and her brother followed just over a year later, on May 6, 1961. Their parents were the journalist Nick Clooney and Nina Bruce Warren, a beauty queen who later served as a city councilwoman.

Zeidler made her life in Augusta, Ky., keeping almost entirely clear of her brother’s orbit of red carpets and film festivals. Her obituary described her as a talented artist who taught art to elementary students at Augusta Independent School. A National Merit Scholar in high school, she belonged to a local book club and the Augusta Art Guild and once served as grand marshal of Augusta’s Annual White Christmas Parade.

One of the biggest events of her brother’s life did draw her into public view: his September 2014 wedding to Amal Clooney in Venice, the same city where he collected the Golden Lion. A photographer caught her in a boat beside him en route to the hotel, their father and the bride’s father riding along. George and Amal Clooney are the parents of nine-year-old twins, Alexander and Ella.

Over the years, Clooney has kept his sister’s life private, and she did the same with his. She once explained that she deliberately did not keep her famous brother’s phone number stored in her own phone. “I wouldn’t want to have it in my phone and then lose my phone,” she told the New York Daily News in November 2012, adding that he called her occasionally but that email suited them both better.

Clooney, whose credits run from “Ocean’s Eleven” to his work as director of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” marked a career honor by talking instead about two children holding hands. The festival closed on September 12, with the Golden Lion for best film going to May el-Toukhy’s “Woman Unknown.”