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Robert De Niro and Tiffany Chen Enjoy Rare Date Night at Tribeca Festival
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Date:2025-04-17 10:16:45
The heat was on for Robert De Niro and Tiffany Chen.
The Meet the Parents star and his longtime girlfriend hit the red carpet June 10 to celebrate the Chanel Tribeca Festival's Artist Dinner in New York City.
For the outing, De Niro—a co-founder of the Tribeca Festival—kept it casual in a dark gray polo shirt and black jacket, while Chen went with a low-cut black dress and a brown shawl. In one snap from the evening, the couple couldn't help but smile for the cameras as they walked hand in hand.
De Niro, 80, and Chen, 45, first hinted at their romance in August of 2021, when the couple were spotted vacationing together in the South of France. But their relationship goes even further back to the 2015 film The Intern, in which De Niro starred as Ben Whittaker and Chen played a small part as a tai chi instructor in addition to serving as a consultant for the scenes featuring the Chinese martial art.
Last year, the couple confirmed they had welcomed a child together, daughter Gia Virginia Chen De Niro, 14 months. Gia is the first child for De Niro and Chen and the seventh overall for the Heat actor, who is already father to daughter Drena, 52, and son Raphael, 47 with ex Diahnne Abbot, 28-year-old twin sons Julian and Aaron with ex Toukie Smith, and son Elliot, 26 and daughter Helen Grace, 12, with ex-wife Grace Hightower.
And while being an older dad doesn't phase the Oscar winner, he has joked that raising a child never gets easier.
"It is what it is," he told The Guardian in October. "It's OK. I mean, I don't do the heavy lifting. I'm there, I support my girlfriend. But she does the work. And we have help, which is so important."
Still, De Niro is loving life as a parent to his littlest one.
"She's pure joy," he told Entertainment Tonight in May. "There's nothing about her, there's no judgment, there's no anything, she just is what she is and it's just pure joy for god sakes."
Curious about the rest of De Niro's family? Keep reading for a complete family tree.
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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