Golden George!
Hollywood icon and Lake Como resident George Clooney was the toast of the Venice Film Festival‘s opening ceremony Wednesday evening, receiving an honorary Golden Lion for lifetime achievement and a hero’s tribute that, at times, had the icon tearing up, and same for his emotional wife Amal Clooney.
The prize was presented to Clooney by his longtime friend and occasional co-star Laura Dern. The pair first worked together more than 40 years ago on the ill-fated horror sequel Grizzly II: Revenge, shot in Hungary when both were just starting out. Dern has since described Clooney as one of her oldest and closest friends, recalling that he looked out for her like an older brother during the troubled production.
The moment was loosely evocative of Clooney’s recent performance in Jay Kelly, a comedy-drama about the personal travails of a Clooney-esque movie star that culminates with the character receiving a lifetime honor at a swanky Italian film festival. That film, which co-starred Dern, premiered in Venice last year, and the ceremony found festival organizers playing an extended clip of the film that mirrored the ceremony that was unfolding in front of the real thing.
Dern kicked off the tribute following the career spanning highlight reel. She called it a privilege to be in attendance to honor her longtime friend. She hailed him as a talent who has been nominated for Academy Awards in six different categories, as a “man of integrity” and someone who is of service in his activism and his fellow actors and filmmakers. “He’s the best friend you could ever have and the funniest person you will ever meet,” Dern said, adding that among his many accolades, he’s been voted People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive not once but twice. “Two times,” she said, doubling it up for emphasis. “Two times!”
In addition to his People repeat, Dern said that Clooney is the ultimate teammate while on set. “You immediately become a better actor. He is a lifeline to pure truth. You are on set with a master. He watches his fellow actors like a hawk. You can feel George rooting for you,” she said. “He only wants everyone to win, and like a camp counselor, he shows up every day reminding us that movie making is a bliss-filled privilege.”
Clooney holds his Golden Lion while walking with Dern during the opening ceremony on Sept. 2, 2026.
Daniele Venturelli/WireImage
Dern didn’t want to deliver the tribute on her own so she put out the call to some members of his inner circle so they could offer some praise, too, and she read personal notes from Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler, Steven Soderbegh, CAA partner and his longtime agent of 25 years, Bryan Lourd, Alexander Payne and Noah Baumbach.
Said Lourd: “The privilege of being his friend and partner in life in film is one of the great gifts and honors of my life. He has shared his heart, his brain, his talent, his [life] with all of us. He is singular and truly one of the greats.”
Said Payne: “What makes George Clooney such a great actor, director and citizen are his humanity and compassion. Not only that, but for us movie buffs, meeting George is the closest you will ever get to meeting Clark Gable or Cary Grant and what that must have been like. He’s just one of those guys. But when you meet him, he makes you feel like the most important person in the room. He remembers everything, tells jokes, pours great wine, treats everybody the same, makes everybody laugh, shares brutal gossip.”
Said Sandler: “Dern, make sure they know there is nobody who thinks of others ever like George.”
Said Pitt: “This pigeon-toed kid from Kentucky, elder statesman, who when you can’t get Brad Pitt, you know Clooney will show up because he never met an award he wouldn’t run to — he’s getting a lifetime achievement award? So what? Why do we love George Clooney? He’s a rogue, a prankster, an altruist, an actor, an athlete, the only guy you want in a crisis, a father, a husband, a global citizen, a defender of justice and a really bad dancer.”
Though he didn’t bust any moves, Clooney did deliver a powerful speech that had all eyes on him following a lengthy standing ovation.
He kicked it off with something light. “You know when they tell you that you’re going to be getting a lifetime achievement award, there are really only two things that come to mind,” he explained. “The first is what an incredible honor this is. And then the second is, do they know something that I don’t?”
He then got serious by honoring those that got him to where he is at this place in his career when he can accept such an honor.
“I’ve been an actor for 45 years now, and looking back, it sounds like it’s intentional, like I had a plan, but I didn’t. For the most part, I was just trying to pay the rent, avoid moving back to Kentucky to cut tobacco, which is what I used to do. When you start reflecting on the years, you realize you really didn’t have a career as much as a series of happy accidents,” he said. “Somebody gave me my first job, somebody else gave me my second job. A director saw something in me that I was yet to see. A writer wrote better lines than I deserved. A crew member made me look like I knew what I was doing. A star, like Laura, was kind enough to let me learn from them. And over time, you begin to realize that nobody arrives anywhere on their own.”
He said he’s learned a lot over the years by coming to places like Venice and experiencing world cinema. “Nobody laughs in a different language. Nobody cries in a different language. Parents worry the same. Kids dream the same. Love looks remarkably similar in language, which makes it hard to believe that we’re as different as we’re constantly being told. We’re living through a moment in time where people in charge, the people with the most money are telling us to fear one another,” he said, nodding to the fraught political times. “But we know better than that, don’t we?”
Then he delivered the exclamation point: “The first people that authoritarians tried to shut down are not politicians. They’re journalists who ask questions. They’re the artists who refuse simple answers. They’re the filmmakers, writers, actors and musicians who insist that someone you have never met is deserving of your empathy. Stories are always dangerous to people who peddle in fear. The people who are afraid of books and music and stories, they’re never the heroes in history. So yes, movies don’t stop wars. They don’t lower inflation. They don’t fix elections, but they do do something remarkable. They remind us that a stranger is never a stranger and that he might just be the hero in somebody else’s story. And if we can still sit together in the dark and care about people that we have never met, I think maybe we’ll be OK.”
Clooney’s history with Venice — both the festival and the city — runs uncommonly deep, though. His transition from television star to major movie leading man gained momentum at Venice when Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight screened at the festival in 1998, marking Clooney’s first appearance on the Lido. Over the intervening years, Clooney became a Venice staple, with some of the strongest films of his career debuting there, including the contemporary classic Michael Clayton (2007), the Coen Bros’ Burn After Reading (2008) and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, among numerous others. Clooney’s transition from leading man to director also received direct support from Venice, as his breakthrough Good Night, and Good Luck premiered in competition and won the festival’s screenplay prize for Clooney and Grant Heslov, on its way to earning six Oscar nominations. And on a more personal note, George and Amal Clooney brought the world’s eye to the city on the water when they held their lavish wedding celebrations at the Aman Venice Hotel in 2014.
“I’ve had so many extraordinary moments in Venice,” Clooney said in a statement when news of his career honor was unveiled in July. “This festival is without question my favorite and to be given the Golden Lion is a tremendous honor. It also probably means I’m old, but I’ll take it.”
He also took his time to soak up the scene and please the throng of fans that had been waiting for him along the corridor, some of whom had started lining up yesterday. Clooney was the rare Hollywood star who greeted the entire crowd of fans from the beginning of the barricade all the way to the far back as he posed for photos, signed autographs and flashed his megawatt smile. His wife, Amal, waited for him near the entrance to the theater as she spent time catching up with Dern and fellow attendee Jewel. Clooney also jumped into the photographer’s pit multiple times to pose with the crush of shutterbugs, even grabbing a camera at one point and snapping a group photo.
Other attendees at the opening night ceremony included Jonathan Bailey, Nicholas Galitzine, Chase Sui Wonders, Nina Dobrev, Zazie Beetz, Alessandra Ambrosio, The Shards star Hayes Warner, Brittany Snow, Owen Thiele, Mary Beth Barone and more.
Clooney’s emotional tribute — which included a musical performance by Tutti Fenomeni with “Love is Not Enough” — was followed by the festival’s opening-night world premiere of Danny Boyle’s Ink, a Rupert Murdoch drama starring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy that is competing for the Golden Lion. Over the next 10 days, Venice will unveil a slate of high-profile competition premieres including Robert Pattinson thriller Primetime, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Look Back and Florian Zeller’s Bunker. A seven-member jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal will choose the Golden Lion and the festival’s other main competition prizes, with the winners unveiled at Venice’s closing ceremony on Sept. 12.
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