Oscar-winning actor and director George Clooney collected the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, September 2. He came back to the Lido the following afternoon and set his own career aside to talk about his older sister, Adelia “Ada” Zeidler, who died of cancer at 65 on December 19, 2025.
The award was presented during the opening ceremony of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, on the stage of the Sala Grande in the Palazzo del Cinema, by his “Jay Kelly” co-star Laura Dern. Danny Boyle’s “Ink” premiered after the ceremony. Ellen Burstyn received a second Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement on September 7. Amal Clooney was beside her husband for the opening, in a floor-length column gown designed for Tom Ford by Haider Ackermann.
La Biennale di Venezia had announced the award two months earlier, in July. “I’ve had so many extraordinary moments in Venice. This festival is without question my favorite, and being given the Golden Lion is a tremendous honor. It also probably means I’m old, but I’ll take it,” Clooney said in a statement at the time.
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?”
Then the speech 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, the filmmakers, writers, actors and musicians who insist that someone you never met is deserving of your empathy.” He said nothing about his sister that evening.
A Hand Held, and a Plea to Seek Joy Out
That came a day later, on Thursday, September 3, at a masterclass 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 described being there 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 then put his sister’s death to the room as an instruction. “Time goes fast. All of this. And so we have to find nothing but joy,” he said. “You have to seek the joy out. You have to demand it.”
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. Amal and I will miss her terribly,” he said on December 20, 2025.
Zeidler died at St. Elizabeth Healthcare in Edgewood, Ky. Her parents survive her, as do her children, Nick Zeidler and Allison Zeidler Herolaga, and 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
Their father, the journalist Nick Clooney, and their mother, Nina Bruce Warren, a former beauty queen, raised the two siblings, born just over a year apart. Zeidler arrived first, on May 2, 1960, in Los Angeles, where the family was then living; her brother followed on May 6, 1961, after they had moved to Lexington, Ky.
Zeidler made her life in Augusta, Ky., well outside her brother’s world of red carpets and film festivals. A talented artist, as her published 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 was a past 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 travelled over for it, photographed boarding a water taxi on the Grand Canal with the rest of the family. 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. She once explained that she deliberately kept her famous brother’s phone number off her own phone. “I do not have his phone number because I wouldn’t want to have it in my phone and then lose my phone,” she said in a 2012 interview with the New York Daily News. “He can phone me and he does occasionally, but the email is more convenient for both of us.”
Alberto Barbera, the festival’s artistic director, called Clooney “a complete and charismatic artist, impassioned and original,” citing performances in “Three Kings,” “Syriana,” “Michael Clayton,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Gravity,” “The Descendants” and “Jay Kelly,” alongside the nine films Clooney has directed, among them “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “The Ides of March.” Clooney used the ceremony to talk about the people who tell stories. The next day he used the Lido to talk about two children holding hands.
