The most impressive thing about Robert De Niro is how prolific he is. The man is 79 years old, and simply cannot stop. In the last 10 years alone he has made 19 films, with four more coming this year. Have they represented the best work of his career? Probably not, although someone out there must love Dirty Grandpa. On top of that, he owns or part-owns a string of highly successful hospitality ventures. And on top of that he just had his seventh child.
This last one counts as news. During an interview with ET Canada to promote his new movie About My Father, reporter Britnee Blair said to De Niro “I know you have six kids”, to which De Niro replied “Seven, actually. I just had a baby”. Blair’s response to this neatly summed up the universal reaction: “Seven? Oh my goodness! Congratulations, I’m so sorry.”
The news of De Niro’s seventh child came as such a surprise, in fact, that ET Canada had to contact his representatives, just to make sure that this wasn’t all just an elaborate prank designed to make us all feel bad about how tired he must be all the time. Confirmation came back quickly; De Niro is definitely a father of seven and, although the name of the mother wasn’t announced, it’s likely to be martial arts instructor Tiffany Chen.
In De Niro’s favour, at least he’s spread them out a bit. He adopted his first child Drena in 1976, when she was five. Her half-brother Raphael was born the same year. Then he had a couple of decades off, before welcoming twins Aaron and Julian with new wife Toukie Smith in 1995. Three years later, after marrying Grace Hightower, De Niro had Elliot. Then in 2011, he and Hightower had a daughter, Helen, via a surrogate. And now there is Mystery De Niro Baby Number Seven. Seven babies in six decades. Which is, however you look at it, a lot of babies.
There was a very interesting piece in Vulture this week, in which Reeves Wiedeman explored the current state of Alec Baldwin. The central point seemed to be that, after the death of Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust, Baldwin has wanted nothing more than to step back from public life. After all, this is what Michael Massee – the man who shot Brandon Lee – did. However, Baldwin can’t just give up acting and live the rest of his days in private, because he had six children in the last 10 years and now has, as one source put it, “A lot of overhead”.
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Things are slightly different for De Niro – hopefully children get a little less expensive over the age of 25, as five of his are – but this might still explain his eagerness to work with less than stellar material over the past few years. Would he have deliberately junked everything he built with Raging Bull by making the hacky, stunty boxing movie Grudge Match with Sylvester Stallone if he didn’t have school fees to pay? Could he have passed on The War With Grandpa had one of his kids not needed to get a car serviced? Might he have spared us Salvage Station, a film that came and went last year without a single person noticing, if he didn’t have so many nappies to buy?
This might not be the case, of course. For all we know, De Niro fell head over heels in love with the quality of the Dirty Grandpa script. However, this – especially when coupled with his new side-career making bread adverts for the UK market – doesn’t immediately seem to be the case. Still, even if his prolific baby-making abilities are to blame for his dodgy career choices of late, it might all still pay off. After all, his forthcoming projects include Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and the Netflix thriller Zero Day, both of which have the potential to be very good indeed. Which just goes to prove that, if you ever want to experience a professional upswing, just go and have a dizzying number of children.