Robert De Niro: ‘How am I as a father? I try my best’
At 81, the actor is in the Caribbean overseeing his most ambitious hotel project yet, where rooms cost $2,500 a night — and doing the morning feeds with his baby daughter Gia.
Robert De Niro is waiting and his people have ensured I arrive in style. My red Airbus helicopter, which took off from Antigua 15 minutes before, lowers itself on to a vast arc of white sand on the tiny Caribbean island of Barbuda. A dusty 4×4 waits to ferry me just a few hundred feet, past a low-rise construction site, to my appointment with one of the greatest and most influential actors of our time: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Heat and so on — plus a surreal 2019 British TV advert for Warburtons bagels.
I’m meeting De Niro at his latest business venture, Nobu Beach Inn. He now co-owns 57 restaurants and 42 hotels around the globe, an empire built up over 35 years since he opened his first restaurant, the Tribeca Grill, in New York in 1990, but this is his first foray into the Caribbean. When it opens late this year rooms will start at $2,500 (£2,000) a night, which you would hope includes breakfast.
As I walk into the hotel’s restaurant, Nobu Barbuda, which is already open, I spot him — slouched on a chair, having breakfast at a table overlooking the ocean with three of his seven children: sons Julian, 29, Elliot, 26, and his daughter Drena, 57, who are on the island for Thanksgiving.
The two-time Oscar winner — The Godfather Part II (1974) and Raging Bull (1980) — waves his family goodbye for now and walks over. “Hmm, how do you do,” he says shaking my hand, a smirk hovering on that comically taciturn and unmistakable face.
Being less keen to start our conversation on his towering six-decade acting career or his complicated family life than I am, he turns to one of his two business partners in Barbuda, Daniel Shamoon, a British real estate and hospitality entrepreneur (the other is the Australian billionaire James Packer), and asks him to talk me through the architectural plans for the new hotel. There are 25 villas, I learn, that you can buy outright — if you have $12 million for one.
Just as we’re about to leave for a drive around the 390-acre site, De Niro turns to Shamoon again. “We’re going to leave them like this?” he says, pointing at the plans fluttering in the ocean breeze. “They’ll blow away.” Without waiting for an answer, De Niro grabs four miniature pots of Bonne Maman jam left over from breakfast and places them on the papers. He then turns to me. “You want one?” he asks, proffering a strawberry jam. I’m good, I say. What about you, do you like a preserve? “Well, you know, if it’s there,” he answers. “You’re tempted, but I try to control myself.” Does that apply to all areas of his life, I wonder.
We walk out of the restaurant to the car and De Niro hops into the back seat. The voice that once asked, memorably, “You talkin’ to me?” pipes up: “Where you from in England?” London, I tell him. “Hmm, I like London,” he says, waving at the construction staff. “You know, that’s one of the heaviest trees in the world,” he adds, pointing at a squat and bushy lignum vitae.
Tour over, I follow De Niro’s brisk gait back through the restaurant and on to the white sand of Princess Diana Beach, so named after the Princess of Wales came here on holiday in April 1997, four months before her death (De Niro never met her). We take a pebbled path to an outdoor seating area dotted with bamboo furniture, colourful fabrics and rattan lamps. De Niro settles into an armchair facing the ocean, removes his bucket hat, places his iPhone on the table and perches a pair of glasses on the bridge of his nose. “It never gets old, that view,” he says, gazing at the beach.
De Niro was born on August 17, 1943, in Greenwich Village, New York, the only child of two bohemian painters, Virginia Admiral and Robert De Niro Sr, who had met at art classes in Massachusetts. They separated when De Niro was two after his American-born father entered into a relationship with the poet Robert Duncan — a subject the actor broached in Out magazine: “I was not aware, much, of it. I wish we had spoken about it much more.” They remained close, and De Niro hangs his father’s paintings in his hotels and restaurants.
Robert Jr was nicknamed Bobby Milk at his progressive high school in Manhattan owing to his pale complexion. He hung out with street kids and turned to acting to overcome his shyness, inspired by the likes of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and James Dean. He studied at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, both in New York, and landed his first role in Brian De Palma’s Greetings aged 24 in 1968.
It was De Niro’s early tour de force in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets in 1973 that sent him stratospheric. The New Yorker critic Pauline Kael wrote: “He is a bravura actor … De Niro does something like what Dustin Hoffman was doing in Midnight Cowboy, but wilder; this kid doesn’t just act — he takes off into the vapours.” The rest is history, and De Niro and Scorsese worked together nine more times, most recently in Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023.
While he’s obviously busy with Nobu Beach Inn, which he visits every couple of months from his home in Greenwich Village to check on progress, he’s still making movies. “Yes, a limited series called Zero Day with Netflix, and I did another movie coming out in March called Alto Knights with Warner Bros,” he says. Does he ever think to himself, ‘That’s it, not another’? “What else am I going to do?” he answers, raising his arms. Concentrate on the hospitality empire? “Yeah, that’s true, I think it’s important to keep busy.”
De Niro met his second wife, the American actress and philanthropist Grace Hightower, at the Knightsbridge restaurant Mr Chow in 1987, where she was working as a hostess. They stayed together, albeit on and off, for 20 years, renewing their vows in 2004 at their farm near the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, surrounded by friends including Scorsese, Meryl Streep and Ben Stiller. They had a son, Elliot, in 1998 and a daughter, Helen, via a surrogate in 2011, eventually separating in 2018.
He is now in a relationship with Tiffany Chen, a 45-year-old US-born martial arts expert, whom he met on the set of The Intern in 2015. Headlines were hit when he became a father for the seventh time in 2023. If baby Gia is with him on the island, he will not say.
His phone rings. He answers tetchily and loudly: “I can’t answer, I’m sorry, I’m in an interview, I’ve got to call you back. OK, bye.”
If I spoke to his children, how would they describe him? “Oh God, they would all have a different answer. Family is so complex.” And you — how would you describe yourself as a father? “I try my best, that’s all. I hope they’ll be happy.”
So he’s a school-run dad. “I’m an early riser,” he says. “I’ve got a 19-month-old baby. I spend my mornings watching [the YouTuber for toddlers] Ms Rachel with her, and I give her her bottle.” Is he a nappy changer too? “No, no, but I used to.”
Surely his life must be worthy of a book. Is he writing one? “I’ve had opportunities but it never quite happens.” Have you read your friend’s new book, I ask. “Which friend?” You know, the one who published his memoir last year? “Oh, Al,” he says of Al Pacino. “No, I haven’t read it.” He laughs.
What music does he listen to? “Easy music, stuff to set the mood in the car, Sinatra.” Were they friends? “I met him a couple of times over the years. Also spa music.” What? “Music for the spa and a station called Chill.”
He refuses to be drawn much more on his many co-stars and Hollywood pals. He has called Donald Trump a “buffoon” and a “tyrant” but doesn’t want to get into politics today, under the Caribbean sun. But back in May he created one of the most memorable scenes of the election run-in when he appeared outside Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan to berate the man who’s now president-elect. He accused Trump of being “just another grubby real estate hustler masquerading as a big shot” and committing “a coward’s violence”.
He concluded: “If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted.” He also did the voiceover for an advert for the doomed Biden-Harris campaign, but I guess even Trump voters will be welcome at Nobu Beach Inn.
His answers, perhaps more in line with his on-screen mode, have a tendency towards the monosyllabic. But maybe I’ve still dodged a bullet. De Niro has a reputation for being notoriously short-fused and belligerent in interviews — storming or lashing out when a question irks him. In 2015 he publicly lambasted the tech mogul Stewart Butterfield on stage at The Wall Street Journal’s Innovator Awards in New York after the former delivered a speech that mentioned he’d watched The Godfather Part II on the plane, concluding: “When you killed Don Fanucci, I liked that.”
When De Niro took to the podium he went for Butterfield: “Whoever the last speaker was,” he said, “I thought you were condescending to us actors, celebrities. I’m going to go on record with you just to say that. And I don’t give a f*** who you are.” It’s still unclear what in particular offended him but, let’s just say, he’s got form.
Are his businesses a distraction from the movie-making, I ask. “Yeah, just something to keep busy,” he says noncommittally.
After opening the Tribeca Grill with the restaurateur Drew Nieporent in 1990 (it’s still going strong, along with the Greenwich Hotel he opened in 2008), he collaborated with the film producer Meir Teper and Nobu Matsuhisa, the 75-year-old Japanese sushi master whose original restaurant in Los Angeles, Matsuhisa, De Niro first visited with the British movie director Roland Joffé in 1993.
He recalls Matsuhisa coming over to their table. “I told him, ‘If you ever want to open in New York, let me know.’ I already had some experience with Tribeca and knew it would do very well there.” The first Nobu opened in New York a year later.
What food does he order at Nobu? “I don’t, they just bring me stuff.” OK, what does he drink, then? “I like cold saké, something I learnt about when I visited Sao Paulo. They have a huge Japanese community, you know.” Anything else? “I like a good white wine, a chardonnay, and a martini — a cucumber martini. And I like all kinds of food, as long as it’s good.” So, not a hamburger guy? “If it’s a great hamburger, of course, I’ll have it.”
He tells me how he first visited the Caribbean as a 24-year-old after his mother heard about a five-day expedition to build an artists’ colony on the uninhabited Ginger Island in the British Virgin Islands. It sounds very bohemian: he and four other boys he’d never met (part of a hippy community aiming to create a commune in the Caribbean) were dropped off to work and fend for themselves. De Niro went along as the official photographer. “It was an adventure.”
He recalls one boy, from Japan, splitting open sea urchins, which he’d never seen before. “I was, like, this is crazy. He cooked them with spaghetti we’d brought with us in seawater. We camped, we drank beer. We had a little dinghy as big as this couch. We didn’t know anything about anything.”
It sounds like the sort of thing people do on reality TV shows these days. “Yes, in a way that was it,” he says. “I like an adventure.” Is that why he’s carrying binoculars? “I always carry them because you never know what you might see — a fish, a turtle, a barracuda. I just don’t want to miss anything.”
He clearly enjoys travelling. He recounts a trip to Everest base camp in 1978 after shooting The Deer Hunter in Thailand, and another around Colombia after The Mission eight years later. “In those days everyone was apprehensive because of the drugs stuff, so we had the Secret Service looking after us.”
His most recent trip was with his son Elliot to see the gorillas in Rwanda. “That was worth doing,” he says. “I like a safari too, and I’m interested in going to Madagascar.” Has he ever taken his kids to Disneyland? “I struggle with that — the rides,” he says.
His words are spare and quiet, not helped by the sound of waves crashing on the sand, but his hands talk for him. He gesticulates constantly, moving them up and down, especially when making a point, not dissimilarly to his The Godfather Part II character, the gangster Vito Corleone.
A fly starts buzzing around his face. It won’t go away, but he barely seems to register it. Does he need some help, I ask. He bats it away and tells me about his first visit to Barbuda 30 years ago, on a day trip from Antigua. “We had lunch at the K Club,” he says of the hotel that previously occupied the Nobu Beach Inn site. “It made a lasting impression on me. I never forgot this beach.”
Twenty years later he was cruising to Antigua from the Grenadines on his business partner James Packer’s boat, looking for possible resorts to buy, when he passed the now abandoned K Club. He immediately rang up Packer and they made an offer.
De Niro’s latest project in paradise comes with controversy. The Barbuda Land Act of 2007 states that all land on the island is communally owned by its inhabitants and cannot be sold to outsiders. To circumvent this, in 2015 the island’s prime minister, Gaston Browne, passed the Paradise Found Act — after the name of De Niro, Packer and Shamoon’s company, Paradise Found LLC — specifically granting Paradise Found a lease of 99 years on the property.
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It did not go down well with the locals. Barbuda is a minuscule 62 square miles with about 1,700 inhabitants. It was settled in the 18th century by enslaved people sent from Antigua by a wealthy British sugar plantation owner, Christopher Codrington, after whom Barbuda’s main town was named. Since the slaves’ emancipation in 1834 Barbuda has been run communally and democratically, if informally, until the 2007 act set it in law.
Then came Hurricane Irma in 2017, which destroyed 90 per cent of the island’s buildings. A mandatory evacuation order was put into place, forcing all its inhabitants to take shelter on Antigua for 30 days.
Seeing a need to upgrade Barbuda’s tourist industry in a hurry, Browne began fast-tracking proposals from outside developers, including for the construction of an upgraded airport accessible to bigger planes and private jets. Some have claimed this is an opportunistic land grab and an exercise in stealth legislation — not to mention a threat to the environment, endangering the wildlife that has always roamed free on the island and destroying the mangroves.
Nobu Beach Inn has a designated mangrove conservation area and I was told by a conservation group they are respectful of the land — with various interests waging war on Browne’s plans. “Protecting the local environment will always be a priority,” De Niro says. “The Nobu Beach Inn is designed to blend into the surroundings and maintain the natural beauty of the landscape — this is what makes the property so special.”
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De Niro’s phone rings. He picks it up. “I have to call you back, I am in a meeting,” he says, in a suddenly much more authoritarian voice.
It’s time to follow him and the photographer down to the beach, where he poses calmly and without fuss. “What’s your name again?” he suddenly asks me. “Bassi?” No, Vassi. “Huh,” he replies.
I can’t leave the island without asking two very British questions. First, does he talk Italian? “Why do you ask?” Bananarama — ring any bells? “Ha-ha, yes,” he says. “That came out in the Eighties, right?” He is right: the girl group got to No 3 in the UK in 1984 with a song featuring the lyrics “Robert De Niro’s waiting/ Talking Italian”. He grins. “Si, parlo Italiano abbastanza bene.” Nice accent.
As we say our goodbyes, I chance it: can we take a photo together? “Sure,” he says, affectionately pulling me towards him and wrapping an arm around my shoulders, our heads touching, as he beams at the photographer. He then gives me a fatherly hug and totters off down the beach, back to his family, his rucksack and trusty binoculars hanging by his side.
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