Although Hollywood movies and television shows tend to show American fathers as irresponsible dullards, in real life there are some pretty good celebrity fathers in Tinseltown.

An interesting article in the Chicago Sun-Times shows that there are some Hollywood celebrities who are very good fathers, at least by the standards of our time, which give a good deal of credit just for being around one’s children.

The story also lists some notoriously bad celebrity fathers, and most of them seem pretty awful indeed. However, the author’s choice to include Will Smith among the bad dads seems unfounded to me. The author admits that Smith "seems devoted to wife Jada Pinkett Smith and their children," but accuses him of being a relentless stage dad. However, the writer gives no evidence for this claim, citing only an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, which hardly seems definitive, to say the least.

Other than that, it’s an interesting story. One hopes that Hollywood writers and directors will look around themselves and discover some of the good fathers in their vicinity, and start depicting such characters more realistically in all their variety, showing more positive examples than they have seen fit to do in recent years.