Robert De Niro is 83 now, and most fans can name his later partners before they can name his first wife. Her name is Diahnne Abbott. She met him on the set of one of his most famous films and married him the year it came out. She later appeared beside him in two more Martin Scorsese pictures before quietly stepping out of the spotlight.
HELLO! magazine revisited the marriage this week in a piece calling Abbott his “forgotten first wife.” Her story runs straight through De Niro’s greatest decade. It also leads to two children who built very different lives in New York, and to one family loss that De Niro spoke about publicly.
How Did a Small Role in ‘Taxi Driver’ Change Her Life?
Diahnne Abbott was born in New York City in 1945, according to Wikipedia and Hollywood Life. Her cousin is the singer Gregory Abbott, best known for the 1986 hit “Shake You Down.” She was a single mother when she landed her first credited screen role, in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
She played the concession clerk at the adult movie theater where De Niro’s Travis Bickle tries to make conversation. The part was small. According to HELLO!, she and De Niro met during the 1975 shoot and began a relationship off-screen. Hollywood Life gives the same account of how they met.
Taxi Driver opened in 1976. It won the top prize at Cannes and earned De Niro an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. The film is still quoted daily, and De Niro improvised one of its most famous lines in front of a mirror. That same year, he and Abbott married.
The wedding brought two children into the picture. Abbott’s daughter, Drena, was born on September 3, 1971, from an earlier relationship. De Niro adopted her in 1976, according to Wikipedia and InStyle, and she took his surname. Their son, Raphael, was born on November 9, 1976, in Los Angeles.
What Roles Did She Play Beside Him After the Wedding?
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Abbott kept working during the marriage, often in films her husband also made. In 1977 Scorsese cast her in New York, New York, the musical drama starring De Niro and Liza Minnelli. Abbott has a short cameo as a club singer performing the Fats Waller standard “Honeysuckle Rose.”
Her biggest part came in The King of Comedy, which premiered in December 1982 and reached North American theaters in February 1983. She played Rita Keene, a bartender and the woman De Niro’s would-be comedian Rupert Pupkin hopes to impress. Rita goes with Rupert to the country house of talk show host Jerry Langford, played by Jerry Lewis. After Langford angrily orders them out, she is the one who persuades Rupert to leave.
Those years were also the peak of De Niro’s career. He had already won Best Supporting Actor for The Godfather Part II, playing the young Vito Corleone. During the marriage, he earned another Best Actor nomination for The Deer Hunter. He then won Best Actor for Raging Bull, the 1980 film about boxer Jake LaMotta.
Abbott built credits away from her husband, too. She played Jeanette Ross in Alan Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. in 1976. In 1984 she appeared as Susan in John Cassavetes’ Love Streams. Two years later she played the mother in Richard Pryor’s semi-autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling.
In 1988, she took a recurring role as Sonia on the Michael Mann crime series Crime Story. That was also the year the marriage ended.
Why Did the Marriage End After 12 Years?
Abbott and De Niro divorced in 1988, according to both Wikipedia and HELLO!. Neither of them has ever given a detailed public account of the split. HELLO! notes that De Niro’s growing fame put pressure on the relationship.
De Niro has rarely spoken about the marriage itself. In a 2014 interview with the Belfast Telegraph, cited by Hollywood Life, he offered a general piece of advice about divorce and children. “The only thing I would say is that if you get married, it’s easier probably not to have children if you’re going to split up,” he said.
After the divorce, Abbott largely stepped back from acting. She came back in 2000 as Blanca Romero in Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, starring Javier Bardem. Her last listed film is Soliloquy in 2002. De Niro remarried in 1997 to Grace Hightower, and he now has seven children in total.
Where Are Diahnne Abbott and Her Children Today?
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Abbott is 81 and lives a private life away from the public eye, according to HELLO!. She has not given interviews about her years with De Niro. The two children she raised with him have both stayed close to the family name.
Raphael, now 49, acted as a boy and young man, then changed course in 2003 when he decided to get a real estate broker’s license. He became one of New York’s best-known luxury brokers, specializing in townhouses and lofts. Since 2008, he has also been a partner with his father in the Greenwich Hotel in TriBeCa. According to InStyle, he once pushed back on the idea that his name did the work: “no one is buying a $10 million apartment because my dad is Robert De Niro.” He has three children with his first wife, Claudine DeMatos, and married stylist Hannah Carnes in 2020.
Drena, now 55, modeled for Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood and became a muse for Emporio Armani. She later moved into acting, with roles in Wag the Dog and The Intern, where she shared the screen with her father. In 2003, she welcomed a son, Leandro, De Niro’s first grandchild. According to InStyle, Leandro appeared with his mother in A Star Is Born in 2018.
In July 2023, Drena announced that Leandro had died at 19. New York City’s medical examiner later ruled the death an accidental overdose. De Niro released a statement the next day, reported by TODAY and other outlets: “I’m deeply distressed by the passing of my beloved grandson Leo.” Drena has kept his memory public ever since. On what would have been his 21st birthday, she wrote on Instagram, “Happy 21st Birthday up in the heavens cosmos my little angel.”