10 memorable movie fathers

Movie dads, like everything and everyone else on the big screen, reflect their time. That’s why the all-knowing patriarchs of Life with Father (1947) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) in classic American cinema began to recede with the emergence of New Hollywood in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Our relationships with movie fathers became more ambivalent and less stable. They could now be contradictory, selfish, even wrongheaded.

There are plenty of celebrated movie fathers you won’t find on the list below: Clark Griswold from National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Guido from Life Is Beautiful (1997), Gil Buckman from Parenthood (1989), etc. There are a lot of dads to choose from, and what makes a particularly resonant onscreen papa is likely influenced by the real-life baggage you bring with you into the theater.

Here are 10 especially memorable fathers from the movies.

10. Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones) in The Empire Strikes Back (1980, dir. Irvin Kershner)

Remember Luke Skywalker’s arch-nemesis, Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones)? Well, SPOILER ALERT––and good God, I hope you’re sitting down for this––he is also Luke’s dad (and Princess Leia’s, for that matter). And with those four words, “I am your father,” The Empire Strikes Back reframed the mythology of Star Wars and made Father’s Day really weird inside the Rebellion.

9. Lt. Col. Wilbur “Bull” Meechum (Robert Duvall) in The Great Santini (1979, dir. Lewis John Carlino)

Robert Duvall is all blustery machismo in this dissection of toxic masculinity decades before that phrase entered public discourse. This adaptation of Pat Conroy’s autobiographical novel about “Bull” Meechum, a Marine Corps fighter pilot approaching retirement, tiptoes toward sentimentality, but director Lewis John Carlino deserves credit for an uncomfortably on-target depiction of a curdled father-son relationship. In the film’s most lacerating scene, Meechum bullies his teenage son (a very good Michael O’Keefe) for having the audacity to beat him at a game of backyard basketball. The Great Santini is not a great movie, but it does boast a great performance from Duvall. He anchors Bull Meechum’s periodically monstrous behavior in the familiarity of real life.

8. Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) in The Squid and the Whale (2005, dir. Noah Baumbach)

Divorce can weaponize children. Few films explore that phenomenon as mercilessly as Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical The Squid and the Whale. Its bitterness is startling. Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) is a deeply insecure, arrogant writer of fiction who namechecks Kafka as one of his “predecessors.” Caught between him and his estranged wife (Laura Linney) are oldest son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), who idolizes his dad, and Frank (Owen Kline), who is beginning to exhibit some peculiar habits. While we cannot speak to the degree of intellectual snobbery of the late Jonathan Baumbach, his onscreen alter ego is a satiric study in unchecked solipsism (Berkman, by the way, was the maiden name of Jonathan Baumbach’s second wife).

7. Ryōta Nonomiya (Masaharu Fukuyama) in Like Father, Like Son (2013, dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)

The nature vs. nurture debate receives a novel spin from Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. Ryōta Nonomiya (Masaharu Fukuyama) and his wife (Machiko Ono) have a cushy home life in a Tokyo high-rise with their 6-year-old son Keita. Ryōta is a workaholic with little time for the boy, but he pays enough attention to make mental notes of Keita’s perceived failings. Then the couple discovers that the birth hospital had accidentally switched their biological child at birth. Keita’s actual parents are Yudai and Yukari Saiki (Lily Franky and Yoko Maki), who have raised the Nonomiyas’ biological child. Yudai is a father in all the ways Ryōta is not: warm, playful, dedicated. But the Saikis are poor, and Ryōta, who presumes his wealth alone makes him and his wife more suitable parents, bristles when Yudai offers parenting advice. Winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Like Father, Like Son is languidly paced but consistently absorbing and emotionally rich as it challenges the importance of bloodlines.

6. Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks) in Finding Nemo (2003, dir. Andrew Stanton)

As anyone who saw Bambi or The Lion King knows, children’s movies often have no qualms traumatizing young moviegoers. Maybe that’s why this animated Pixar classic gets the psychological scarring out of the way early, when a barracuda devours a clownfish named Coral (voiced by Elizabeth Perkins) along with all but a single egg. Her demise leaves Coral’s nebbishy husband, Marlin (Albert Brooks), alone to care for the sole surviving small fry, whom Marlin names Nemo (Alexander Gould). Dad, a clownfish already prone to worrying, proves to be an overly protective single parent. When Nemo is caught by scuba divers, however, Marlin must stifle his own anxieties and venture into the big, bad ocean to find his son. Andrew Stanton and co-writers Bob Peterson and David Reynolds infuse the adventure of Finding Nemo with an understanding of a father who must learn to balance protectiveness with trust.

5. Chris Gardner (Will Smith) in The Pursuit of Happyness (2006, dir. Gabriele Muccino)

If this rags-to-riches tale weren’t true, you’d think it had to be the invention of a motivational speaker. Chris Gardner (Will Smith), penniless and homeless in the early 1980s, remains committed to caring for his young son while working toward a career as a stockbroker. Things go from bad to very bad for Chris. He and his boy (Smith’s offscreen son, Jaden Christopher Syre Smith) are evicted. Chris is hit by a car. He is forced to eat at San Francisco soup kitchens and stay at homeless shelters and even, in a particularly harrowing sequence, in the public restroom of a subway station. Movies are rife with tearjerkers in which good people are beaten down by life, but The Pursuit of Happyness features a likeable and self-assured protagonist (the real Chris has a cameo toward the end) who weathers dark periods while remaining relatively free of self-pity.

4. Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979, dir. Robert Benton)

Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep) moves out of a comfortable New York City apartment to go off and find herself (it’s the 1970s, ‘nuff said), leaving her workaholic husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman) to raise their 7-year-old son (Justin Henry). Surprisingly for a low-key domestic drama, Kramer vs. Kramer was a box-office hit. Hoffman gives a naturalistic, Oscar-winning performance as the advertising executive who learns what most working parents already know: balancing career and family is effing hard. Writer-director Robert Benton summons little sympathy for absent mom Joanna. In rewatching this Academy Award Best Picture winner, in fact, it’s striking to realize what a kick in the teeth Kramer vs. Kramer was to the women’s rights movement of that era. It is a measure of Streep’s skills that she wrings empathy for someone the movie treats with a fair amount of disdain.

3. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, dir. Wes Anderson)

Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is a scoundrel. A disbarred attorney and ex-convict, he is crooked, tactless, and can’t think beyond his own self-interest. As a parent, Royal is neglectful when not outright belittling to his brilliant adult children (Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, and Luke Wilson). Despite having deserted his family long ago, he reevaluates things when he finds himself homeless. He returns to his estranged family’s New York City townhouse and schemes to scuttle the planned marriage of his ex-wife (Angelica Huston) to a kindly widower (Danny Glover). Hackman resented that Wes Anderson had specifically written the part for him, considering it presumptuous for the filmmaker to think he knew the actor’s range. Hackman was miserable during the making of The Royal Tenenbaums and made sure everyone else was, too, bullying Anderson throughout and grumbling that the movie would wreck his career. Perhaps his on-set irascibility worked to the film’s benefit. Hackman’s comic performance is magnificent; his Royal is a self-serving louse, but still open to redemption.
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2. Jason “Furious” Styles (Laurence Fishburne) in Boyz n the Hood (1991, dir. John Singleton)

Laurence Fishburne was never better than as Jason “Furious” Styles, father to Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), the teenage boy at the center of Boyz n the Hood. When Tre is sent by his single mother (Angela Bassett) to live with dad in South Central Los Angeles in hopes the man will impart some wisdom to his son, Furious is more than up to the task. “Any fool with a dick can make a baby,” he tells Tre, “but only a real man can raise his children.” A mortgage broker by profession, Furious is tough, principled, disciplined, and caring––in short, a near-perfect patriarch for a young Black man navigating a dangerous world. John Singleton said he based the character on his own father, with whom he was sent to live when he was 12. In Boyz n the Hood, Furious tells Tre, “You may think I’m being hard on you right now, but I’m not. What I’m doing is I’m trying to teach you how to be responsible.” If Singleton’s dad told him something similar, it must have taken hold. At age 24 with his debut film, Singleton became the youngest director and first African American ever nominated for a Best Director Oscar. (See more in The 15 best coming-of-age movies.)

1. Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, dir. Robert Mulligan)

Atticus Finch (and what a name!), a creation of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, set the standard for the movie archetype of the wise, patient father. Director Robert Mulligan’s unfussy direction and Horton Foote’s sensitive screenplay helped ensure the film version holds its own alongside Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, but there is no overstating the impact of Gregory Peck as the loving patriarch and gentlemanly Southern lawyer. The actor’s courtly manner and soothing baritone breathe life into a character who became iconic almost immediately. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the adult Scout Finch recounts her childhood––Mary Badham plays preteen Scout––and the time her father, Atticus, defended a Black sharecropper falsely accused of rape. “If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks,” Atticus, a widower, advises his daughter. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” How can any flesh-and-blood dad measure up after we’ve seen Peck, who won the Oscar for Best Actor, showing Scout what it means to be empathetic and courageous? 

Honorable mention: Antonio Ricci in Bicycle Thieves (1948, dir. Vittorio De Sica), Henry Spencer in Eraserhead (1978, dir. David Lynch), Oscar Ekdahl in Fanny and Alexander (1982, dir. Ingmar Bergman), Anthony Miller in The Father (2020,  dir. Florian Zeller), Stanley T. Banks in Father of the Bride (1950, dir. Vincente Minnelli), Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972, dir. Francis Ford Coppola), Jake Shuttlesworth in He Got Game (1998, dir. Spike Lee), Will in Leave No Trace (2018, dir. Debra Granik), Woody Grant in Nebraska (2013, dir. Alexander Payne), Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)