Robert De Niro, 80, cries over raising baby daughter: ‘I want to be around for as long as I can’
Daddy De Niro.
Robert De Niro got choked up while talking about his 9-month-old daughter, Gia, in a new interview.
The Oscar winner shares the little one with film producer girlfriend Tiffany Chen.
“I’m an 80-year-old dad and it’s great,” De Niro, 80, told AARP on Sunday for their February/March cover story.
“Everything that I’m consumed with or worried about just goes away when I look at her.”
“It’s wondrous,” the “Goodfellas” star added.
The actor, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” noted that the 9-month-old has been “observing every little thing.”
“She has a very sweet kind of way of looking at you and just taking you in,” he gushed, adding that the look reminded him of how his daughter Helen, who he welcomed with socialite Grace Hightower in 2011, used to act.
“I don’t know where it’s gonna go with her later when she gets older,” he continued of Gia.
“But she’s thinking and she’s observing every single watching.”
“It’s really interesting,” he concluded.
“I want to be around for as long as I can to enjoy it and enjoy her.”
In addition to Gia, De Niro is also dad to Drena, 51, and Raphael, 46, from his first marriage to Diahnne Abbott in 1976, twin sons Julian and Aaron, 27, with model and actress Toukie Smith, and son Elliot, 24, and daughter Helen, 11, with second wife Grace Hightower.
De Niro and Chen, 65, welcomed Gia in April 2023.
The “Godfather Part II” star spilled the beans during an interview with “ET Canada” when the reporter asked him how his six children were doing.
“Seven, actually,” the two-time Oscar winner corrected at the time.
“I just had a baby.”
The subject was brought up again during an interview with Page Six while on the red carpet at the premiere of De Niro’s film “About My Father.”
“I’m okay with it. I’m good with it,” the “Irishman” star said of raising children later in life.
“[It] never gets easier.”
In October 2023, De Niro admitted that much of the “heavy lifting” of raising Gia has fallen on Chen.
“I don’t do the heavy lifting,” he told the Guardian.
“I’m there, I support my girlfriend. But she does the work. And we have help, which is so important.”
“With a baby it’s different [than] with my 11-year-old. My adult children. My grandchildren. It’s all different,” he added.
At the time, his older children had yet to meet Gia.
“Not yet, but they will,” he told People at the “A Bronx Tale” screening at the Tribeca Film Festival.
