Nick Clooney, a septuagenarian television presenter and a brother of the late singer Rosemary Clooney, was defeated on Tuesday in his effort to win an open House seat in a northern Kentucky.

He lost to Republican businessman Nick Davis, despite generous campaign contributions from such Hollywood glitterati as Michael Douglas and Renee Zellweger.

Despite that high-profile backing, it was an uphill battle for Clooney in solidly Republican Kentucky, where only one member of the state's eight-person US congressional delegation was a Democrat.

Clooney's actor son George, who made his name in the medical series "ER", so far has found a different outlet for his political interests, last year co-producing the "K Street" TV series about the Washington political establishment, which aired on the cable television network HBO.