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I was pampered by all my father's directors and producers during childhood. But at home, my father made sure I led a normal life.

Things with my dad were pretty good until I won an Academy Award. He was really loving to me until I got more attention than he did. Then he hated me.

I wasn't close to my father, but I wanted to be all my life. He had a funny sense of humor, and he laughed all the time - good and loud, like I do. He was a gay Irish gentleman and very good-looking. And he wanted to be close to me, too, but we never had much time together.

Few men in their 70s looked as good as my father did. What was his secret? Genes, maybe, since he didn't exercise or diet, and he kept a candy drawer, drank a pot of black coffee every day, and read in the middle of the night. Still, he took such joy in being a dad - and in life in general - and his happiness showed.

My father realizes that he did okay with me. He did the best he could.

I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her.

My father was a huge influence on me.

My father was a very warm, gregarious, sociable person who had many interests. He lived his life very much in the present, full of activities and the next project. He had many hobbies. He was not given to retrospection.

Unlike my mother, who was unashamedly delighted when I decided to become an actor, I always feel that my father, had he lived longer, might have been a touch disapproving of some of my career - I think he might have tutted a bit at 'Men Behaving Badly.'