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Vin Diesel names daughter in tribute to Paul Walker

Posted at 12:10 PM, Mar 23, 2015
and last updated 2015-03-23 12:10:15-04

NEW YORK CITY -- Vin Diesel and his longtime girlfriend, Paloma Jiménez, welcomed their third child last week. The Furious 7 actor announced the birth with a Facebook picture featuring "What a Wonderful World" lyrics.

In an interview with TODAY, Diesel revealed the name of his new baby girl.

"I named her Pauline," he told Natalie Morales.

Diesel, 47, named his daughter as a tribute to his longtime friend and 'Fast and Furious' series cast member, Paul Walker.

"It felt like, you know, a way to keep his memory a part of my family and a part of my world," he said.

Walker died in a car crash in 2013, but Diesel said it was as if he was in the delivery room with him.

"He was in the room," Diesel recalled. "There's no other person that I was thinking about as I was cutting this umbilical cord. I just ... knew he was there."

Diesel also got emotional when talking to a crowd about Walker during a "Furious 7" advanced screening last week in Los Angeles.

"It was in some ways the hardest movie I ever had to do because the relationships that you see on film are so real," Diesel said. "When the tragedy happened, I lost my best friend. I lost my brother."