In a very sad and moving moment on her daytime talk show, Ellen DeGeneres revealed that her father, Elliot DeGeneres, has passed away at the age of 92.
She used her announcement to pay tribute to her father, a former insurance salesman. “There was not one bone of judgement in his body,” she said.
She began the announcement by saying, “Before we go to break, there’s something else I want to talk about. I mentioned yesterday when I was talking about all the mudslides that are going on in my community of Montecito, which is heartbreaking, I said that I had a lot going on in my life. In addition to what’s going on in Montecito, I lost my dad this week.”
Ellen described her father as a man who was proud of her, and as a loving and very accepting person. “We only took one family vacation. When I was a little girl, we came to this lot, to the Warner Bros. lot and took the tour and went around. And now, I work on the Warner Bros. lot and I have my own stage with my name on it. So he was really proud of that.”
Ellen revealed some personal details about her father’s passing. She said that she had been with him right before the end and that she was able to say goodbye to him. And then just 10 minutes before his passing, she saw a magnificent rainbow. “I was leaving the building, and I looked back and there was a rainbow over the Warner Bros. studio. This looks photoshopped,” she said, as the photograph was shown to the audience. “This is what I saw after I talked to my dad, and he died ten minutes after that. Pretty amazing. I got a rainbow before he died.”
Our best wishes go out to the DeGeneres family during this difficult time.