Robert De Niro and Tiffany Chen's 35-Year Age Gap Roasted by Jimmy Kimmel at 2024 Oscars
You talkin' to me? At least we assume that was Robert De Niro's reaction when 2024 Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel took a playful swipe at the 80-year-old's relationship with girlfriend Tiffany Chen, some four decades his junior.
"In 1976, Jodie Foster was young enough to play Robert De Niro's daughter," Kimmel said in his Academy Awards monologue, referencing a tween Foster's role as an underage prostitute in Taxi Driver. "Now she's 20 years too old to be his girlfriend."
And though Foster was nearly two decades younger than the two-time Oscar winner in the legendary film, "I understand [that they were scared of me]," Foster told Kimmel on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this past January, when asked about past comments she's made. "I was 12. And they had to say things like, you know, 'Can you pull his fly down?' And it was a little awkward."
Though she wasn't really afraid to throw her weight around a bit.
A child actress who booked her first commercial at age 3, Foster had more credits to her name than both De Niro—who starred as lonely Vietnam vet Travis Bickle—and director Martin Scorsese when they filmed in 1975.
"So I was like, 'Whatever. Just, move over,'" she said. "Yeah, they were a little scared, Scorsese especially, who kept giggling every time he talked to me. He'd start giggling and De Niro had to take over."
And though neither De Niro nor Foster won Oscars for their work in the '70s classic (she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress; he for Best Actor), they both had a shot at taking home trophies at the 2024 Academy Awards.
Foster, recognized for her role in NYAD, was once again bested in the Best Supporting Actress race, The Holdovers' Da'Vine Joy Randolph beating out Foster, Oppenheimer's Emily Blunt, The Color Purple's Danielle Brooks and Barbie's America Ferrera.
Killers of the Flower Moon star De Niro, meanwhile, faced off against American Fiction's Sterling K. Brown, Oppenheimer's Robert Downey Jr., Barbie's Ryan Gosling and Poor Things' Mark Ruffalo. (Check out all of the winners here.)
Either way, De Niro had quite the cheering section. His already prolific family grew in 2023 with the birth of his seventh child, he and Chen's now-11-month-old daughter Gia.
Read on for a guide to De Niro's sprawling family.
Robert De Niro met his first wife, Diahnne Abbott, while making Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, in which she had a bit part as the ticket taker at a porn theater Travis Bickle patronizes in the gritty 1976 classic.
They tied the knot April 28, 1976.
The couple also appeared together in Scorsese's 1977 tortured-romance drama New York, New York and his 1982 satire The King of Comedy.
The actor adopted Diahnne's daughter Drena, born Sept. 3, 1971, when they got married.
De Niro and Abbott's son Raphael was born Nov. 9, 1976. Raphael later recalled the family moving from Los Angeles (where his father was born) to New York (the city his dad is most associated with) when he was about 10, telling The Real Deal it was a major "culture shock."
Raphael's parents divorced in 1988.
Drena, whose first Instagram post is a black-and-white snap of her as a child out to dinner with her parents and then-couple Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston ("at this point all I wonder is WTF was I doing there ???" she wrote), has remained in show business as an actor and producer.
Growing up, "it definitely wasn't the typical family lifestyle," she told Everything Zoomer, "but there was a lot of warmth, fun, craziness." She described her father as "a non-judgmental, open-minded person, always accepting of what people feel their paths are."
Raphael went into real estate, which also runs in the family. Per his website, he leads The De Niro Team at Douglas Elliman in Manhattan, and he's a partner in TriBeCa's Greenwich Hotel.
The 46-year-old shares three kids with ex-wife Claudine de Matos and has been married to stylist Hannah Carnes since March 2020.
Acknowledging his last name alone turned him into fodder for tabloid coverage, Raphael told The Real Deal, "I just try to keep my head down and keep my private life private."
Leandro De Niro Rodriguez, Drena's son with artist ex Carlos Rodriguez, died of a suspected overdose on July 2, 2023. He was 19.
A 20-year-old woman was arrested two weeks later on federal drug distribution charges in connection with Leandro's death, which his mother had quickly attributed to fentanyl-laced pills.
On Aug. 11, 2023, which would have been her son's 20th birthday, Drena wrote on Instagram, "Thank you for the happiest and most profound 2 decades of my life, little angel. I hope you are at peace and your spirit is filled with joy today and always."
De Niro called his grandson's death a "shock," telling People, "And I just then started thinking about all the things I could have, should have done maybe with him. I don't know if that would've made a difference. And so that's always playing through my mind. It shouldn't have happened."
De Niro and model-actress Touki Smith are parents to twin sons Julian and Aaron, born Oct. 20, 1995.
The actor and Smith, who at one point also owned a catering business that handled the food for then-couple Sean Penn and Madonna's anniversary party, split up in 1996 after eight years together.
While Aaron leads a private life, Julian is an actor who most recently appeared on Broadway in the Tony-nominated The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. In 2022 he played a young Barack Obama in the Showtime limited series The First Lady.
"For my kids, I tell them, 'If you want to be an actor or you want to do this or that, that's fine as long as you're happy. Just don't sell yourself short,'" De Niro told People in January 2020. "That's the most I would say—push yourself a little more and reach for what you really think it is you want to do. Don't be afraid."
De Niro is dad to son Elliot, born March 18, 1998, and daughter Helen Grace, born via surrogate on Dec. 23, 2011, with second wife Grace Hightower.
He married the Precious actress on June 17, 1997. De Niro filed for divorce barely two years later, but they reconciled before the split was official and renewed their vows in 2004.
They again began divorce proceedings in 2018.
When promoting Silver Linings Playbook, in which he played a father of an adult son with bipolar disorder, De Niro opened up about having a child with special needs, telling Katie Couric in 2013, "I don't like to get emotional, but I know exactly what [my character] goes through." In 2016 he shared that Elliott has autism.
De Niro's seventh child was born April 6, 2023.
CBS Mornings anchor Gayle King got to do the name-reveal honors on her show May 11. "How cute is this baby?" she said of then-1-month-old Gia. "Robert De Niro and his partner, that's Tiffany Chen, are over the moon about this little girl."
While the two-time Oscar winner admittedly doesn't do the "heavy lifting," he waxed rhapsodic about having a baby in the house.
"Everything that I'm consumed with or worried about just goes away when I look at her," he told AARP. "It's wondrous."
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