Oscar-winning actor and director George Clooney accepted the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival with a speech that moved away from his own career and toward the death of his older sister, Adelia “Ada” Zeidler, who died of cancer at 65 on Friday, December 19, 2025. His remarks came roughly nine months after her death.
“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 went on to describe being at her side as she died, holding her hand, and said that moment brought home to him just how fleeting everything is. It seemed to him that only minutes had passed since the two of them were small children together, clasping each other’s hands.
A Plea to Seek Joy Out
From there, the two-time Academy Award winner turned his sister’s death into an instruction for the audience in Venice.
“Time goes fast, all of this, and so we have to find nothing but joy,” he said. He went on: “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, told the crowd he had no answers about what comes next. “Because look, I don’t know what happens after we die,” he said. Not one person he has known, he noted, has ever come back to spell out how it all turns out — so the life he can speak to is this one, and in this one, he said, a person has to chase joy and try to find it for their family and their friends.
What He Said in December
The actor and director had addressed his sister’s death in a brief statement to People the day after she died. “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. He added that he and his wife, Amal Clooney, would miss her terribly.
No type of cancer has been made public.
Zeidler is survived by her children, Nick Zeidler and Allison Zeidler Herolaga, along with her brother and his wife. Her husband, retired Army Captain Norman Zeidler, died before her.
A Kentucky Artist Away From the Spotlight
The siblings were born just over a year apart. Zeidler arrived on May 2, 1960, in Los Angeles, and Clooney on May 6, 1961, children of journalist Nick Clooney and Nina Bruce Warren, a beauty queen who later served as a city councilwoman.
Zeidler built her life in Augusta, Kentucky, and stayed almost entirely out of her brother’s orbit of red carpets and film festivals. Her obituary described her as a talented artist, and she put that training to use teaching art to elementary students at Augusta Independent School over the course of several years. She had been a National Merit Scholar in high school, belonged to a local book club, was a member of the Augusta Art Guild and once served as grand marshal of Augusta’s Annual White Christmas Parade.
Zeidler did step into public view for one of the biggest events of her brother’s life. She attended his September 2014 wedding to Amal Clooney in Venice, the same city where he collected the Golden Lion, and was seen riding through a canal with him during the celebrations. George and Amal Clooney are the parents of nine-year-old twins, Alexander and Ella.
Clooney has kept his sister’s life private over the years, 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 Columbus Dispatch in 2012, adding that he called her occasionally but that email suited them both better.
That is the sister the Venice audience heard about as Clooney — whose credits run from “Ocean’s Eleven” to his work as director of “Good Night, and Good Luck” — accepted a career honor and used the moment to talk about two children holding hands.