Father's Day: The things my dad taught me

To mark Father’s Day, leading personalities - from Jamie Oliver to John Cleese - offer their thoughts and memories of their own upbringing

Jamie Oliver and his father Trevor Oliver at The Cricketers, Clavering, near Saffron Waldon, Essex
Jamie Oliver and his father Trevor Oliver at The Cricketers, Clavering, Essex

There was a moment in Eddie Redmayne’s moving portrayal of Professor Stephen Hawking’s physical disintegration in The Theory of Everything that stood out with particular poignancy.

Enfeebled by the progression of motor neurone disease, Redmayne’s Hawking tries in vain to crawl up the stairs of his home. At the top stands his infant son. The carer has become the crawler. But, even as the father-son relationship is inverted, Hawking smiles up lovingly at the toddler and says soothingly, his speech now slurred: “It’s OK Robbie.”

As an interviewer, I have become fascinated by my famous subjects’ thoughts on their fathers, how the relationships have shaped them and the influence they still exert in their adult lives.

My interest stems in part from the bond I have with my own father. If I was facing discouraging odds, he would tell me: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” If I was afraid, he would quote Franklin D Roosevelt’s famous words from his inaugural speech as President during the Great Depression of the 1930s: “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” He instilled in me the value of working hard. Success, he would tell me, is 10 per cent talent, 90 per cent hard work. Above all, he showed me unqualified love and his influence on my childhood has reached far into my adulthood.

Here, to mark Father’s Day, a selection of leading personalities offer recollections from their own upbringing.


Richard E Grant

The actor was born in Swaziland and his father Henrik Esterhuysen was the last Minister of Education before the British Protectorate’s independence in 1968. As a 10 year-old, he inadvertently witnessed his mother’s adultery with his father’s best friend in the front seat of a car. After his mother’s departure, his father became “so distraught and got so drunk” that Grant ended up “as a boy having to parent” his father. Once, after he’d disposed of a crate of his father’s Scotch Whiskey, Grant said: “He tried to shoot me but missed because he was so drunk.”

A psychoanalyst linked Grant’s breakdown at 41 to a father whose world had come crashing down at the same age. He said this revelation lifted an enormous burden from him and dissipated the anger he felt. He “absolutely adored” his father, who was full of remorse in the mornings after his drunken rampages and is, he says, his “daily guide for how to live an honourable life - sober”.

Richard E. Grant

Richard E. Grant

Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver ’s father introduced him early to hard work. As an eight-year-old he would help out in the pub his parents, Trevor and Sally, still run in Essex. He was "probably nine 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 was a very loving dad.”

Jamie Oliver with his father Trevor Oliver

Jamie Oliver with his father Trevor Oliver


Rick Stein

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.”

Rick Stein, Insert parents Dorothy and Eric, Padstow durng the 1950s

Rick Stein, and inset, his parents



Dawn French

French, now 57, was also 18 when she lost her father to suicide. She said: “I still have sadness about it. Massive sadness. And I think it’s been a centre point of my life what happened with my dad.” It was, she said, “just like a bomb went off in our family.”

As a child and teenager, French had 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.”

Dawn French, Insert, Dawn's father Denys French with her older brother Gary in 1955

Dawn French, Insert, Dawn's father Denys French with her older brother Gary in 1955

Lenny Henry

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.

Lenny Henry

Lenny Henry

“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’.”


Mick Hucknall

By the age of three, 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.

REG HUCKNALL AND SON MICK HUCKNALL

Hucknall, and inset with his father


“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.”




John Cleese

“My relationship with [my father] was enormously strong,” John Cleese said. “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.

John Cleese. Insert with his father, Reginald

John Cleese, and inset with his father Reginald

"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 I knew more about than he did."



Martin Amis

Amis had an 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. But, he added: “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.”

Martin Amis. Insert Two Literary Generations Sir Kingsley and Martin Amis together

Martin Amis, with father Kingsley


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.”


Sir Richard Eyre

Eyre spoke of a “very tormented relationship” with his father, a man who had endured a brutal upbringing and who, on his return from serving in the navy to become a farmer in Devon, didn’t take much interest in who his son was. “And who I was turned out to be the polar opposite of who he was. So he then set himself up in opposition to me. So if I expressed a love of arts, he would deride the love of arts.”

Later, sitting by his father’s body, Sir Richard said he saw with great clarity that he’d spent the whole of his life trying to prove he was worth something on his father’s terms. And he’d completely failed. Friends have told him that his father was very proud of his success but he never expressed it to his son.

Richard Eyre

Sir Richard Eyre

(Photo: Andrew Crowley)

When Sir Richard cast Sir Ian Holm as King Lear in a memorable 1997 production, his sister asked him why he’d put their father on stage. He hadn’t intended to, but said he might have mentioned him anecdotally in rehearsals. “It might have been an accretion [of anecdotes] but probably what is more true is that all fathers are King Lear and that I wasn’t teaching Ian to emulate my father, it was just that Shakespeare had extracted some kind of truth about the way fathers are in a position to act as regal bullies and many of them take that opportunity.”