Casey Affleck Reveals His and Ben Affleck’s Dad Timothy Died Earlier This Year

Casey Affleck revealed publicly that his and Ben Affleck's father Timothy died in the last year during a Venice Film Festival press conference on Tuesday, Sept. 8

The Affleck family previously announced on July 24 that Ben and Casey's mother Chris died at 83 on June 2

Timothy and Chris divorced when Ben and Casey were children, and Casey said he "really wanted to show" his new movie Company to his parents

Casey Affleck revealed publicly that his and Ben Affleck 's father Timothy Affleck died in the last year during a Venice Film Festival press conference on Tuesday, Sept. 8.

Casey, 51, appeared in Venice alongside his girlfriend Caylee Cowan and sons Atticus and Indiana and others from the cast of his new movie Company , a Gothic and vampire-inspired movie that marks Casey's third film as a director. Ben also made an appearance to support his brother.

During a press conference, Casey stated that he dedicated the movie to both of his parents and indicated that both died this year. (Casey and Ben's mother Chris Affleck died at 83 on June 2, which the family announced on July 24.)

"It's dedicated to my parents because I lost both my mom and my dad this year, and they were very important to me," Casey said during the press conference, in response to a question from an Italian journalist. "I really wanted to show this movie to them, and I didn't get to. I think they would have liked it."

Casey and Ben's father Timothy and mother Chris divorced when Ben, now 54, was around 11 or 12 years old. According to a 2000 interview with Ben in The New York Times , Timothy once performed in the Theater Company of Boston alongside actors like Blythe Danner, Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman and was an aspiring playwright who often worked odd jobs and struggled with alcoholism.

At that time, the Times reported that Timothy had been sober since 1990 and was working as a counselor at a California-based alcohol rehabilitation center. "The most enduring lesson my father taught me is the degree to which it's possible to change your life and patterns," Ben said in that interview.

In February 2020, Ben told PEOPLE that Timothy had been sober for 30 years and described his sobriety as "the principal lesson and legacy of his life — is that he dramatically improved it."

" Part of being an adult is learning that your parents are just people . They're not perfect. They were just doing their best. As a child, we expect perfection out of our parents," he said at the time.

He continued, "I learned to be able to look at things that I wish were different about my childhood and say they [my parents] did their best. They were dealing with their own stuff and their own childhood trauma. The goal is to try and break some of these painful cycles."

A source told PEOPLE in July that Chris' death was " hitting Ben and Casey really hard ." According to an obituary the Affleck family shared at the time of Chris' death, she was given six months to live in December 2025 and wanted to live to see Casey's son Atticus graduate high school. (Casey shares his two sons with ex-wife Summer Phoenix .)

Per that obituary, Chris died two days after she attended the graduation ceremony with her family on May 31. She died from cardiopulmonary arrest while "visiting her son's residence," according to a death certificate obtained by PEOPLE.

In Venice, Casey said that he pours his own life experiences into his movies, but often finds he does not fully understand what they mean until time has passed.

"The good thing about being an artist, the best thing, maybe, is that you can take all of the hardest experiences in your life and put it into your work and it just makes you better," he said. "If you're willing to face it all, be honest about it all and show up vulnerably with those feelings and allow for the fact that you might not be able to really fully understand them, but you're willing to put them into what you're making, it's a blessing. For me, it's the only way that I can understand what's happening in my own life."

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A release date for Company has not yet been announced.