Kentucky
‘My hero.’ George Clooney’s sister dies at 65 in Northern Kentucky
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Meg Vogel, Cincinnati
George Clooney’s sister, Adelia “Ada” Zeidler, died on Friday in Northern Kentucky.
Zeidler died at St. Elizabeth Hospital on Dec. 19, according to her obituary. Clooney confirmed to People magazine his sister died after a battle with cancer. She was 65.
“My sister, Ada, was my hero,” Clooney told the magazine. “She faced down cancer with courage and humor. I’ve never met anyone so brave. Amal and I will miss her terribly.”
Zeidler was born in May 1960 to her parents, Nick and Nina Clooney in Los Angeles, her obituary says. She was an artist and worked as an elementary art teacher at Augusta Independent School for several years. She was a member of the Augusta Art Guild and was a past grand marshal of Augusta’s Annual White Christmas Parade.
Augusta, Kentucky, is a small town about an hour east of Cincinnati along the Ohio River. It was the childhood home of Clooney while his father, Nick Clooney, was a reporter for WKRC Local 12.
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.
“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, saying, “I really enjoyed being a wife and a mother and that kind of wound up taking precedence with me.”
Zeidler was preceded in death by her husband Norman Zeidler, who died in 2004.
She leaves behind her two children, Nick Zeidler and Allison Zeidler Herolaga and her husband, Kenny; her brother, Clooney and his wife, Amal; and several uncles, aunts, and cousins.
A funeral Mass will be offered at noon on Monday, Dec. 22, at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Maysville, Kentucky. Private interment will be in the St. Patrick Cemetery in Washington, Kentucky.
USA TODAY reporter Brendan Morrow contributed.