A Father's Day Celebration: Hollywood's Best Father-Son Pairs

Last month we did this for Mother's Day, and I wanted to do the same for a Father's Day, a countdown of my favorite Father/Son pairs in Hollywood.  Unfortunately, Father/Son pairs are not as consistently great as Mother-Daughter pairs (for every Martin there's a Charlie, for every Donald there's a Kiefer), but I still think I came up with a solid list.  Here are my favorite father-son pairs in Hollywood:

5. Walter and John Huston

It's not often that a dad gets to win an Oscar on the same night as his son.  It's even rarer when the son is the guy who directed his dad to the Oscar, but that's what happened in 1949 when Walter & John Huston won matching Oscars for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (it's a magnificent movie if you haven't sen it).  John would continue directing and eventually acting, giving the movies their greatest villain Noah Cross in Chinatown.

4. Lon Chaney and Lon Chaney Jr.

Like father, like son has never rang truer than with the Chaneys.  Both of them went into the Universal horror movie business, with Lon Sr. taking on the grotesque Phantom of the Opera, while his son went a bit hairier with Wolf Man.  Along with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, they defined movie monsters for generations of filmgoers.

3. John, Keith, and David Carradine (David not pictured)

John Carradine is one of those great character actors you see in movies like The Grapes of Wrath and sort of marvel at, a guy you recognize but don't always know he's about to be in the picture (he starred in over 200 movies, so he made it into a lot of them).  His sons included David Carradine, who would famously play both in the Kung Fu movies and most memorably (for me) as Bill in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill films.  Keith Carradine I had a wild crush on in Nashville and looked like my friend Steve (whom I also had a crush on), so he makes the list (my only affinity for Robert is as Lizzie McGuire's dad, so I shall skip him here).

2. Henry and Peter Fonda

Though he's most often paired with Jane in lists like this, Henry Fonda also had a pretty splendid son in Peter.  Though he never became the screen icon that his father did (Henry's best role, though, was in a supporting role in Once Upon a Time in the West, which you must see immediately along with Sierra Madre), he made up for it with decades of strong character work to do his dad proud.

1. Kirk and Michael Douglas

It says something when not only the father-son pair has Oscars, but they also both have AFI Life Achievement Awards, which is a true testament to how legendary both of these actors are.  Kirk has grown on me in recent years if for no other reason that he keeps showing up in movies that I like, while Michael has always been one of my all-time favorite actors and I wish he would stretch his gifts a bit again in another classic role like Wall Street.

And there you have it-who are some of your favorite Hollywood pairs?  Share your thoughts in the comments!  And if you're a dad, Happy Father's Day!