Updated Dec. 21, 2025, 11:02 a.m. ET
George Clooney is mourning the loss of his sister.
The “Jay Kelly” star, 64, confirmed in a statement to People magazine that his sister Adelia “Ada” Zeidler has died after a battle with cancer. She was 65.
“My sister, Ada, was my hero,” Clooney told the outlet. “She faced down cancer with courage and humor. I’ve never met anyone so brave. Amal and I will miss her terribly.”
USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Clooney.
According to an obituary on the website of Metcalfe-Hennessey Funeral Home in Augusta, Kentucky, Zeidler was a “talented artist,” who “shared her skills as an elementary art teacher at Augusta Independent School for several years.” She died “peacefully surrounded by the people she loved” on Dec. 19 and is survived by her two children and her husband, Kenny.
In a 2015 interview with “CBS This Morning,” Clooney noted he is “really close with” his family. “My sister, I’m very close to,” he said.
Zeidler was not a public figure like Clooney. But in 2012, she gave an interview to the New York Daily News, where she shared that she had dreams of becoming an actor herself, but did not do so because of her fear of rejection.
“Yes, there is a part of me that would very much like to have become a famous actress or something like that,” she said at the time. “I enjoy acting and I was fairly OK at it, but I did not have a thick enough skin for it.”
She added that she instead prioritized raising her children, noting, “I really enjoyed being a wife and a mother and that kind of wound up taking precedence with me.”
Speaking about her relationship with Clooney in the interview, Zeidler also told the New York Daily News that her brother would “tell me little things that are going on here and there but mostly we just gab like brothers and sisters do about inconsequential matters.”
Clooney is coming off a role in the Netflix drama “Jay Kelly,” in which he played a fictional movie star who regrets prioritizing his acting career over his personal life. Clooney told USA TODAY he does not share this same sense of regret.
“This guy lives with a lot of regret, and I don’t have that,” he said. “I mean, certainly I have regrets. Obviously, there’s things I wish I’d done better – ‘Batman & Robin,’ for one. But overall, what I liked was the idea of exploring this guy had my journey been earlier or had my decisions been to divorce myself from family and friends and chase stardom in a very different pursuit. I was interested in seeing how this could have gone if I’d made other decisions.”
Contributing: Brian Truitt
