John Cleese, Dawn French and Jamie Oliver all recall how their fathers shaped the person they've become. Photos / Getty Images
"My relationship with [my father] was enormously strong.
"He really did the emotional mothering that I was not getting from my mother [who could be anxious and depressed] and we were very, very close.
"But as I got older - 19, 20, 21 - he seemed to be unwilling to let go of the father-child relationship. He would sit there giving me lots of advice, often about things that I knew more about than he did."
Dawn French, now 57, was 18 when she lost her father to suicide. "I still have sadness about it," she says. "Massive sadness. And I think it's been a centre point of my life what happened with my dad." It was, she says, "just like a bomb went off in our family". As a child and teen, French felt empowered by her "very funny" father. A key moment for her came when hot pants were in fashion and, dressed in a very short pair, she was about to go to a party. "I've always been a big girl and shouldn't really have been wearing hot pants. But he told me I was completely beautiful and how amazing I looked in them. I went on cloud nine to this party and I've actually never left that party. It was armour."
Jamie Oliver was introduced early to hard work by his father. As an 8-year-old, he would help in the pub that his parents, Trevor and Sally, still run in Essex. He was "probably 9 or 10" when he started preparing vegetables in the kitchen. "Dad has always expected a lot of graft from me. A lot of physical effort. And certainly enough obedience. I was just scared enough of Dad - which I think is important. A little bit of fear doesn't hurt. But he's a very loving dad."
Martin Amis had enormous affection for the late Sir Kingsley, although he was "very absentee" as a father.
"He only got really interested in me when I started reading properly," he said. "Whenever you saw him on his way to his study, he would always say something funny and it was always because of the way he said it, the wit, the use of words, and that went an awful long way. Meeting him around the house was always a pleasure. And he did tell us stories at night and they were great stories." As Amis grew older, the relationship deepened. "It was Hitch [his great, late friend Christopher Hitchens] who said he'd never seen a father and son get on as well as we did. It was also a great literary friendship, too."
Of his dying: "You do feel a sense of levitation when your father dies, that you're sort of coming up into the front rank of those facing death, that parents are sort of intercessionary figures."
Rick Stein's father, Eric, killed himself when his son was 18. "Our relationship certainly still has an impact because it was not an easy one. He was immensely charismatic, very intelligent and very charming to lots of people, but not really to me.
"I'm sure he liked me, he probably didn't have the energy with me at home to go that extra distance to make me feel wanted and special.
My second wife, Sarah, was made to feel special as a child and the difference between me and her is everything. She looks on the bright side and I don't." There was, however, a fun and reassuring side to his father, too, and Stein wondered whether he might have been overdoing his negative influence. But, he insisted:
"I do get quite tearful when I think about his death and its ramifications. If you are made to feel a bit inadequate when you're young, one of the things you do, if you can get away with it, is overcompensate."
Lenny Henry was born to Jamaican immigrants in the Midlands, and his father, who had worked in a foundry, died when he was 17.
"He was very unknowable. You never saw his face, you just heard his voice: 'Stop the noise. Leave your sister alone. Move! I want to watch the cricket.'
"My older brothers Seymour and Hilton, because they were grown up when I was a kid, went to the pub with him and talked about things like the shape of a beer glass, the beauty of the stroke in cricket. I never had a conversation with him like that.
He was this unsmiling bloke in the corner, reading the paper for quite a lot of my life.
"My dad never did hugging, never said 'I love you', my parents never said it. It wasn't until my mum was poorly near the end of her life that we started saying 'I love you, I love you, I love you'."
By the time he was 3 years old, Mick Hucknall's mother had "abandoned" him and left the family home. His father, Reg, was a barber who worked a gruelling six-day week, but had breakfast and dinner on the table for his son every day. "It was incredible what my dad did. He did all the laundry, all the washing up, all the house repairs. He even grew vegetables in the garden. He sacrificed his whole way of life for me and our nucleus of two males in the house." But when puberty struck, his "fantastic" relationship with his father soured. He was unhappy at grammar school and when he began drinking two or three pints a night, his father was powerless to stop him. The Simply Red frontman said his upbringing left him with "absolutely no" social skills.
"I even struggle a bit now. I don't know how to communicate in a conciliatory way where you don't say what you think is true - you say what you think that person would like to hear that would make them like you. It's actually been something, incredibly, I've only discovered since having a child [myself]." But Hucknall inherited something of his father's determination. "Probably what helped me get established in music was that I just didn't stop. I kept on going."
- Canvas, Telegraph
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