Oscar-winning actor and director George Clooney collected the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, September 2, then set his own career aside to talk about his older sister, Adelia “Ada” Zeidler, who died of cancer at 65 on Friday, December 19, 2025.
The award was presented during the opening ceremony of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, which began at the Sala Grande in the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido and opened with Danny Boyle’s “Ink.” A second Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement went to Ellen Burstyn on September 7. His wife, Amal Clooney, was beside him for the opening, wearing a Tom Ford bandage dress by Haider Ackermann.
“I’ve had so many extraordinary moments in Venice. This festival is without question my favorite and to be given the Golden Lion is a tremendous honor. It also probably means I’m old, but I’ll take it,” he said.
Then he turned to Zeidler. “My sister, who I was very close to, got cancer last year, and she died very quickly,” Clooney said as he accepted the honor.
He described being with her as she died, holding her hand, and said the moment drove home for him how fleeting everything is. Barely minutes seemed to have gone by, he said, since the two of them were small children together, clasping each other’s hands.
A Plea to Seek Joy Out
The two-time Academy Award winner then put his sister’s death to the room in Venice as an instruction.
Another line from that stretch of the speech: “Find joy in the things that make [us] miserable.”
“Time goes fast, all of this, and so we have to find nothing but joy,” he said, before adding: “You have to seek joy out, and you have to demand it, and you have to make sure that you demand it of yourself.”
Clooney, 65, said he had no answers about what comes next. “Because look, I don’t know what happens after we die,” he said. No one he has known has ever returned to spell out how it all turns out, he noted; this life is therefore the only one he can speak to, and in it, he said, a person has to chase joy and try to find it for their family and their friends.
What He Said in December
A day after his sister died, the actor and director had already addressed the loss in a brief statement to People magazine. “My sister, Ada, was my hero. She faced down cancer with courage and humor. I’ve never met anyone so brave,” he said on December 20, 2025. He and his wife would miss her terribly, he added.
Her children, Nick Zeidler and Allison Zeidler Herolaga, survive her, along with her brother and his wife. Her husband, retired Army Captain Norman Zeidler, had died before her.
A Kentucky Artist Away From the Spotlight
Their father, journalist Nick Clooney, and their mother, Nina Bruce Warren, a beauty queen who later served as a city councilwoman, raised the two siblings, born just over a year apart. Zeidler arrived first, on May 2, 1960, in Los Angeles, and her brother followed on May 6, 1961.
Zeidler made her life in Augusta, Ky., well outside her brother’s world of red carpets and film festivals. A talented artist, as her obituary put it, she spent several years bringing that talent to the classroom, teaching art to elementary students at Augusta Independent School. In high school she had been a National Merit Scholar. She belonged to a local book club and to the Augusta Art Guild, and she once served as grand marshal of Augusta’s Annual White Christmas Parade.
She did step into public view for one of the biggest events of her brother’s life. Venice, the same city where he collected the Golden Lion, hosted his September 2014 wedding to Amal Clooney, and Zeidler was there, riding through a canal with him during the celebrations. Twins Alexander and Ella, now nine years old, are the children of George and Amal Clooney.
Clooney has guarded his sister’s privacy over the years, and she did the same for him. Her famous brother’s phone number was something she once explained she deliberately kept out of her own phone. “I wouldn’t want to have it in my phone and then lose my phone,” she told The Columbus Dispatch in 2012. He called her occasionally, she added, but email suited them both better.
Alberto Barbera, the Venice festival director, commended Clooney as a complete and charismatic artist whose appeal is built on credibility rather than image, citing “Three Kings,” “Syriana,” “Michael Clayton,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Gravity,” “The Descendants,” “Good Night, and Good Luck.” and “The Ides of March.” But Clooney, whose credits run from “Ocean’s Eleven” to his work as director of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” used the career honor to talk about his sister, and about two children holding hands.
