In an interview with AARP, 80-year-old movie legend Robert De Niro teared up while reflecting on welcoming his seventh child last year.
"I'm an 80-year-old dad and it's great," he shared of his daughter Gia. "Everything that I’m consumed with or worried about just goes away when I look at her. It's wondrous. She has a very sweet kind of way of looking at you and just taking you in. And my other daughter, Helen, had that too. They just look at you and take it in. So I don't where it's going to go with her later when she gets older, but she's thinking, she's observing everything and watching. It's really interesting. I want to be around for as long as I can to enjoy it, enjoy her."
De Niro and his partner Tiffany Chen welcomed Gia last year. In an interview with Gayle King shortly after, Chen said she lost functions in her face after giving birth. "When I went home, I started to feel like... my tongue felt strange," she told King. Chen was then diagnosed with Bell's Palsy, a condition that causes weakness on one side of the face. Most people fully recover from the condition, which is most likely to impact those in their third trimester up until a week post-partum.
When De Niro learned that Al Pacino was expecting his fourth child at 83 last year, he praised his occasional co-star. "What a guy," he remarked. "Go Al, God bless him."
Elsewhere in the interview with AARP, De Niro spoke about his appreciation for frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese, with whom he has made ten feature-length films. "Marty has that special way of letting people do what they can do best," he shared. "And it's not just me that he's this way with. He's this way, of course, with people he works with in general."
He also said that he committed to star in Scorsese's The Killers of the Flower Moon, for which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 96th Academy Awards, long before he did The Irishman with the legendary director. He previously won Best Actor for his work with Scorsese in 1980 with Raging Bull, and was also nominated for Taxi Driver and Cape Fear.
Watch the full interview with De Niro above.
