Six stars send a Father's Day message out to their dads
Danny DeVito
My father, Danny, didn't get to see my kids. He died 28 years ago. I had just got married. But my father was very important in my life. He was a stay-at-home kind of dad. First he had a candy store on Springwood Avenue, Asbury Park in New Jersey. Then, when I was still young, he decided to go into business where he could work from home and just use a phone. He became a bookie taking bets on horses.
I loved it. I could see him whenever I wanted. If you have a father who wants to spend time with you, which mine did, then you're really fortunate. You get that rush of being with your dad, going places, even if it's just shopping or to the movies. We used to fish a lot, my father and me.
I owe my dad a lot. I mean not to get too far out about this, but as soon as you're born, your parents die. That's it. Everything goes to the kids. Shakespeare said the day you're born is the first day you start to die. I'm paraphrasing, of course. But this is serious stuff. You give up so much when your kids are born. You give up your freedom. You alter your life, your work, your entire sleep schedule. We go through life thinking about number one, as we should. Then you have kids and suddenly it's all about them. I owe a great deal to my father in terms of him always being there.
He also taught me to be prepared. If you feel like going on a hike: well, do you have all the right equipment; do you know where you're going; are you going to get lost? Am I ever going to see you again? All these things you have to think of, and it's the same thing with life. My father taught me to know what I'm doing and be prepared.
I still miss him. There's that emptiness that you have to take with you. But that's part of being a human being.
The Lorax is released on 27 July
Helen McCrory
My father, Iain, knew no gender differentiation. He was raised in a household where his parents shared the housework. His father's mother had died, and my grandfather was one of three boys raised by their dad. There was never any differentiation of male or female roles, whether it be gender characteristics or a job to be done.
There was never any sense in our house of traditional male or female worlds. I didn't realise how unusual this was until I grew up and met other people, mainly men, who expected me to do things because I was a woman. This perplexed me. I was, like, "Really? Gosh, is that what you think my world is?" In that way my father was very inspiring.
He was part of the diaspora of the Catholics from Glasgow, all those bright young men who came down south to seek their fortune in London. He entered theForeign Office, and was told, "You're coming into the B-stream" because he didn't come from Oxford or have a private income that would allow you to become an ambassador. He had to work his way up in the diplomatic service, which is what those bright, young working-class men did. By the time he retired, we had lived in east Africa, Paris, Brussels and the UK.
As an adult, when you see your father with your children it reminds you how he was with you. He came last weekend. He never reads stories at night, he just comes up and sits down and one of the children will say "I want a story about a monkey" and he'll tell you a true story about a monkey. Actually, God knows what's true and what's not – who cares? Why let the truth get in the way of a good story!
There's a lot of laughter when Dad's around. He taught you to laugh at yourself because he laughed with you, not at you. And he had the ability to teach you independence and security.
For our holidays, my father would take us to France. I remember going on this long walk to a lighthouse. We were looking at the ocean and he was unusually quiet, and then he said: "I came here when I was your age, as part of the postwar effort."
Children of deprived inner-city areas – like my father – would be sent on these trips, their working-class families saving money to buy shoes for the trip, the boys with skinheads. They would have amazing food and wine at lunch and walk to the lighthouse. My father said: "When I was 13 I stood here, and my ambition was to one day be able to bring my family here." It was at that moment that I realised how far my father had come.
I owe everything to my father. He's still waiting for the cheque.
• The Last of the Haussmans is at the Lyttelton theatre, London SE1
Oliver Stone
My father, Louis, was an honest man – a Wall Street broker in the 30s through to the 60s. He worked until the day he died. That's a rare breed. He was a Republican all the way, but what I'd call a responsible Republican. Wall Street today is very different to the Wall Street my father knew.
He used to say to me, "Who do you think you are? You think other people are thinking about you? They're not – not for more that five or 10 seconds."
The best advice he ever gave me was: "Communicate. Simplify." I think that's as good a piece of advice as any.
I am driven like my father. Because of him, I considered working on Wall Street. When I was 17, I got a summer job at the cocoa and sugar market in France. Everyone was yelling on the floor and I had to carry messages back and forth and not screw up. I learned a lot about finance and worked my way up to assistant buyer. It was a fascinating, wonderful, noisy experience.
But while my father had always been very good at finance, I was less so. I went on to Yale University and studied economics, but I lost on every stock I ever invested in. Eventually I began to resent money as the criterion by which to judge all things, and there grew to be a battle between my father and me about this.
"Going into movies is crazy," he would say. "You aren't going to make a dime." He thought I was a bum and when somebody keeps saying it, you begin to think, "Maybe I am." What was I put on this planet for?
The culture got out of control in the 80s and kept going on and on and on in the 90s, and 2000s, with inflation. All of a sudden, millions became billions. A billion dollars is an unbelievable amount of money. Forbes magazine ran a cover a few years ago: "The 1,000 Richest Billionaires in the United States." My father would roll over in his grave.
Sam Worthington
When I was 19 and about to go to drama school my dad, Ronald, had a heart attack. He had a triple heart bypass. He was working class, and for years had had a job in a power plant. Dad said, "Bugger working for a living", quit his job, and decided to live a little. He caught the travel bug. He and my mum just travelled, all around Australia.
They are still at it; Dad doesn't have to worry about money or any of it. After Avatar, I said, all right, where do you want to live? He said Tasmania, so I bought them a house there. But they're never there ... they say it's freezing and they go on holiday to hot places!
The best thing my dad ever did for me was when I was finishing school. I was doing a bricklaying apprenticeship because I wanted something to fall back on. He put me on a plane, with $400 in my pocket, and sent me to the other side of the country and said: "Now work your way back."
It was a case of getting off the plane in Cairns and thinking, I don't know where I'm staying, I don't know anyone, let's go. It was the best way of growing up. I did bricklaying, fibre glassing, I was a nanny, drove those rickshaw things, worked in a sandwich store – anything to get me from one place to the next. Success is good because it has not only changed my life, it has changed my dad's life too.
Man on a Ledge is out now on DVD and Blu-ray
Olivia Wilde
Evelyn Waugh was my grandfather's distant cousin on my dad's side of the family. I didn't know my grandfather Claud but he was an amazing journalist like my dad [Andrew Cockburn] – and my mum [Leslie Cockburn, the writer and 60 Minutes producer]. Claude was friends with Graham Greene and fought in the Spanish civil war with Hemingway. The stories from my dad's family history are inspiring. I think that's why all us kids in the family feel really driven towards greatness – and not in a conventional way. Both my parents are extraordinary writers, journalists, thinkers and truth-seekers.
Dad and Mum taught me from an early age the importance of being a useful human being. He got me involved in activism. Growing up in Washington DC gives you a sense of what volunteering can accomplish, what marching on the mall really means. I've been going to protests since I was 10 – any kind of civil rights cause.
One of my fondest memories of Dad is the summers we spent in County Waterford, in Ireland, where we had a wooden fishing boat with an engine. Dad and I would go down to the cove in the morning, haul out the boat into the bay and go out and catch mackerel. The fish would be flopping around in the bottom of the boat and Dad taught me to gut them and throw the guts to the seagulls.
That was an amazing moment, hauling in our victorious catch while hundreds of seagulls spun around us in the sky, waiting. Then we would eat mackerel for days – mackerel fish cakes, mackerel pâté for the next week. It was one of my favourite things to do with my dad.
House season eight and season one to eight box set are released on DVD on 22 October by Universal Pictures
Thomas Haden Church
My biological father is no longer with us. He abandoned my mother when my sister was three, I was one and my mother was pregnant with my younger brother. My mother had a few other ill-fated marriages when she was young, after my biological father. Then she met my "dad", who was the only "father", other than my maternal grandfather, that I ever knew.
My mum married George Quesada when I was eight. He was on a military salary, with three children of his own, when my parents conjoined their families. He immediately took on three more mouths to feed, along with my mum. He was very disciplined. He taught me that if you're going to commit to something, then follow through.
Acting just sort of landed on me. I was living in Dallas trying to carve out a voice-over career. I had done a little bit of acting in college and my agent put me up for this independent film and I got a part.
I told my parents that more than likely I was going to move to Los Angeles. My mother was very opposed to the idea but my dad said: "Look, this could be a folly, but if you're really going do this, you owe it to yourself to completely commit. Do everything you have to do to understand the industry, not only as a craft and an art, but as a business."
My dad just turned 86. He is a very taciturn man with an excellent sense of humour. He's also brilliantly intelligent. He's had three careers. After the military he worked in government and then went into education, teaching at Texas University. He has a master's degree in Latin American history. When he started his academic career he was in his early 70s and retired several years ago.
I'm a fairly careful person, and I owe that to my dad.
I think making careful choices is the backbone of a strong character. My dad is really strategic. Michael London, the producer of Sideways, said to me once: "You're so careful with your choices that you almost don't make a choice at all." It's true! I really meditate on things such as the movies I choose, carefully measuring between the script, what I've done recently and what I want to do.
The stockmarket crash was in 1929. Dad was born in 1926. So his formative years, his teenage years, were defined by the subsequent economic strife. I think that's why he's always been paranoid about financial security.
There's a Texas saying, though I don't know that it originated in Texas: "You gotta earn your spurs every single day." My dad is that guy.
Killer Joe is released on 29 June
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jun/16/danny-devito-celebrates-fathers-day
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