The Venice Film Festival will honor George Clooney with its 2026 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Clooney – who is one of only three people to have been nominated in six different Oscar categories throughout his career (best picture, director, lead actor, supporting actor, original screenplay and adapted screenplay) – will be celebrated on the Lido in his triple guise as actor, director and producer.
“A perfect combination of the star glamour of days gone by, remarkable professionalism, and modern sensitivity, the actor has crossed genres with rare versatility: war movies with ‘Three Kings’ and ‘Syriana’; thrillers with ‘Michael Clayton’; sophisticated comedies with ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ and ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’; science fiction with ‘Gravity’ and ‘Solaris’ and and bittersweet comedies with ‘The Descendants,’ ‘Up In the Air,’ and ‘Jay Kelly,’” the Venice Biennale – which oversees the fest – said in a statement.
“In each one of these movies, he calibrated his register while remaining true to himself: ironic and melancholy, fascinating and reflective, brilliant and capable of unexpected depth,” it added.
The Biennale statement went on to underline that Clooney did the same thing “in the nine films he made when he decided to go behind the movie camera, all of which reveal a demanding and generous concept of cinema,” it noted, citing Clooney-directed films “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” “Good Night and Good Luck,” “The Ides of March,” and “Suburbicon” as “examples of films that are refined, ambitious, and outside the rules and conventions of Hollywood cinema.”
But Clooney is also being celebrated by Venice for the fact that the works he directed, and his public persona, also reflect his other vocation, “a commitment to social and humanitarian causes, making him a figure of absolute prominence in the universe of show business today,” the Biennale statement concluded.
Commented Clooney: “I’ve had so many extraordinary moments in Venice. This festival is without question my favorite and to be given the Golden Lion is a tremendous honor.” He further added: “It also probably means I’m old, but I’ll take it.”
Clooney is a Lido aficionado having strutted down the Venice Palazzo del Cinema red carpet several times over the decades with movies such as 1998’s “Out of Sight,” 2005’s “Good Night, and Good Luck,” 2024’s “Wolfs” and “Jay Kelly” last year.
Venice chief Alberto Barbera in his tribute to Clooney pointed out that “In his triple capacity as actor, director, and producer, George Clooney is a complete and charismatic artist, impassioned and original, who has transformed a deep vocation into one of the most luminous career trajectories of contemporary film,” he said.
Barbera praised Clooney for having had “An early career launched without shortcuts, with small roles in TV series and B movies until his major success as the star of the series ‘ER,’ formed an actor who is able to inhabit the screen with disarming spontaneity.”
“He is endowed with the gift of making his characters seem not only credible but desirable, approachable, and human, thanks to his undeniable charm,” Barbera added.
“But Clooney’s charisma is constructed on his credibility, not on his image, because his seductive side has never been merely aesthetic,” he concluded.
Clooney has scored Academy Awards for best supporting actor for playing a veteran CIA officer in “Syriana” (2005) and as a producer alongside Ben Affleck and Grant Heslov on “Argo” which scored the Oscar for Best Motion Picture in 2012.
Most recently, in 2025, Clooney earned a Tony Award nomination for his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of “Good Night, and Good Luck” in which he starred as Edward R. Murrow. The show made Broadway history as the first live Broadway performance to be simultaneously televised on CNN to audiences across the world.
The 83rd edition of Venice will run Sept. 2-12, with the festival’s lineup being announced July 23.
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