Over the centuries, faithful to the philosophy of his acting and life teacher Stella Adler, according to which the performer must disappear behind his characters, Robert De Niro publishes a few laconic interviews, always reluctantly, very often monosyllabic and only to promote his films under contract. His private life? Always mysterious. Two wives, six children. Drena, now 51, and Raphael, 46, with first wife Diahnne Abbott, twins Aaron and Julian, 27, with Toukie Smith (whom he never married), Elliot, 25, and Helen, 11, with second wife Grace Hightower.
No concessions to the paparazzi. But seven years ago, she surprised everyone by declaring on a morning TV show that her son Elliot was autistic. And the other day there was another surprise, again coincidental: he said he had become a father for the seventh time at the age of 79. No mother’s name, just clarification that “he is a wanted son, these things are planned”. The interviewer asks if fatherhood has become easier, he only replies: “It has never been the case.” The mother – as the tabloids painstakingly reconstructed – is not the second wife Grace Hightower, but the new partner Tiffany Chen, 45, whom he met in 2015. De Niro did not provide further details: no age of the child, no name. However, Britain’s well-documented Chron was quick to photograph the new mum in a park, holding a baby of about a month and a half.
An old-school Italian-American with artistic interests outside of cinema and very few friends, almost all outside of show business, De Niro remains so intriguing because he takes everything seriously, from work to personal life. He’s the anti-influencer, with no social media presence, whose life is the opposite of a reality show (in this respect he’s reminiscent of the almost contemporary Bob Dylan). Following the 2016 statement about Elliott’s autism, two things followed that were completely unprecedented by De Niro’s standards. The first: since then he has appeared regularly in the campaigns of the Special Olympics, the games reserved for people with cognitive disabilities because Elliott is a good tennis player, giving them interviews about his private life with great candor and humanity.
The second consequence of admitting that his son has autism is that De Niro provoked the first and only controversy of his career: he had originally included in his Tribeca Film Festival the documentary about a disbarred doctor, the author of a Study he later retracted linking vaccinations to autism. The protests were immediate and were exacerbated by the fact that the two-time Oscar winner officially declared himself vaccinated, attributing his son’s condition to vaccinations he had administered as a child. He was forced to withdraw the film from review, but shortly thereafter upped the dose (of controversy), thereby confirming his support for the film’s theses.