I've always been part of comedy. One of the things about our family was that if we were reasonably funny with each other particularly my two brothers and myself when my father was upset with something you'd want to make sure in some way you made him laugh. Because when he didn't laugh you were in trouble!

My father really was not the dominant person who raised the family it was my mother who raised the family.

While I have felt lonely many times in my life the oddest feeling of all was after my mother Lucille died. My father had already died but I always had some attachment to our big family while she was alive. It seems strange to say now that I felt so lonely yet I did.

I remember saying goodbye to my father the night he left to join the Navy. He didn't have to. He was older than other servicemen and had a family to support but he wanted to be a part of the fight against fascism not just make movies about it. I admired this about him.

It has to be real and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society is because we don't acknowledge that family is important and it has to be people who are present you know and mothers and fathers both are not present enough with children.

Until he lost all his money my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.

I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father mother children - is fundamental to our civilisation.

I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity my father who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility and my mother's father who was always in trouble with gambling debts.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible.

My mother was passionate. She was stubborn the dominant one in the family. She dominated my father.

If you go from a structure where you have the support and that partner and that construction of a family and that's broken apart I think that's probably a lot harder than always being a single mom and having the father being a support in another area.

We really were a very musical family. Father managed to buy us a small pump organ and I just loved this instrument.

My father never talked about the sacrifices that the family made for me.

I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist the solo flute for Toscanini.

Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.

I don't hide my feelings but when it comes to illness I guess I don't panic. My father was the same way. I'm the provider for the family and the caretaker. If I panic who is anybody going to run to?

My grandfather's family used to own a pasta factory in Naples and they would go door-to-door selling their pasta. So his love of food came from his parents which was then passed down to my mother and then again to me.

My father was the center of the family and everyone tried to please him.

My mother at least twice cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.

I think my father would have liked to have been an artist actually. But I think he didn't quite have perhaps the drive or I don't know I mean he had a family to bring up I suppose.

I'm a strong person I'm a strong family man I'm a strong husband and a strong father.

My parents were drawn to the idea that there was space and opportunity in Australia. For the meagre sum of £10 you could sail your entire family out to Australia so that's what my father chose to do.

A lot of what I'm obsessed with is the relationship and the dynamics between people and the family particularly brothers and their father.

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.