Who’s the Daddy? With Father’s Day looming, The Telegraph picks the best and worst in the paternity stakes .

1 Homer Simpson

Lazy, gluttonous and stupid, the cartoon character created by Matt Groening in the late Eighties is described by Dan Castellaneta (who voices him) as “a dog trapped in a man’s body”. But this all‑American everyman’s every misdeed is redeemed by his chest-bursting, tail-wagging love for his family. D’oh! D’awwwww…

Pop Idol or Bad Dad?

Pop Idol: Although he sometimes forgets his youngest daughter, Maggie, exists, her first word was still “Daddy”.

2 Silas Marner

A miser loses his gold then finds the warmer wealth of fatherhood in George Eliot’s moving novel. “I can’t think o’ no happiness without him,” declares Marner’s adopted daughter. “And he’s took care of me and loved me from the first, and I’ll cleave to him as long as he lives.”

Pop Idol: Silas shows up the snobs who claim: “Deep affections can hardly go along with callous palms and scant means.”

3 King Lear

Based on the legend of “Leir of Britain” (a mythological pre-Roman king), in Shakespeare’s great tragedy the ageing monarch makes terrible errors of judgment in dividing his kingdom between his three daughters. Sigmund Freud believed Lear’s vain, foolish and vengeful behaviour was motivated by “incestuous desires for his daughters”.

Bad Dad: Mistaking one of his kids for a stool is the least of his errors.

4 Atticus Finch

The widowed hero of Harper Lee’s classic 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird teaches his children courage and compassion by example when he defends a black man accused of raping a white woman in Thirties Alabama. In 2006 British librarians voted this the book – ahead of the Bible – that everybody must read.

Pop Idol: So perfect, he never even eats dessert.

5 “Pa”

An unconventional approach to character-building is essayed by the absentee father in Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue. He gives his son a bully-baiting name to ensure the boy develops a little gravel in his gut. When the pair meet there’s “one hell of a fight” and a touching reconciliation.

Pop Idol: He may have walked out when his son was just three, but he did leave the lad a guitar and a great story.

6 Dad

We can’t see the titular subject of Winslow Homer’s 1873 oil painting Dad’s Coming!, but we can feel how powerfully the missing fisherman is loved and longed for in the faces of the woman and children waiting anxiously on the beach of Gloucester, Massachusetts, for his return.

Pop Idol: Heroically sailing the ocean to put fish on the table.

7 Darth Vader

Idealistic Luke Skywalker discovers, much to his dismay, that his father hails from the “dark side” in George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy. Although the ruthless cyborg isn’t the greatest role model, he does offer his son a job in the family galaxy-ruling business and makes the ultimate sacrifice even after the ungrateful boy has lopped his hand off.

Pop Idol: How many other fathers have a theme tune written by John Williams?

8 Merciful Father

The tenderness with which the bearded old man holds his kneeling child’s shoulders says it all in Rembrandt’s 1660s interpretation of The Return of the Prodigal Son. The patient, merciful glow of Rembrandt’s golds and reds reaches out of the gloom to enfold the viewer in a powerful, paternal embrace.

Pop Idol: “The weak can never forgive,” said Ghandi, “Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

9 Giorgio Germont

What’s a chap to do when his feckless son runs off with a courtesan and drags the family name through the mud? The anxious father in Verdi’s La traviata demands that devoted Violetta leaves his son and we forgive him for his beautiful aria, as he finally forgives her.

Pop Idol: Some would argue harsh but fair in the social context of his time.

10 Albert Edward Ladysmith Steptoe

“You dirty old man!” is how Harold Steptoe regularly addresses his filthy, foul-mouthed father in Galton and Simpson’s Sixties sitcom about rag-and-bone men, Steptoe & Son. Here’s a parent who thwarts his son’s every effort to move up in the world, ratcheting up the emotional blackmail to keep Harold at home.

Bad Dad: “Morally, spiritually and physically a festering flyblown heap of accumulated filth,” says his son.

11 Author’s Father

A familiar domestic scene in Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” describes the poet’s father’s “straining rump among the flowerbeds” as it “bends low, comes up 20 years away/ Stooping in rhythm through potato drills.” The poet himself has no spade, but vows to put equally earnest effort into his writing.

Pop Idol: “By God, the old man could handle a spade.”

12 ''Clyde’’

“Baby your da-da loves you,” begins Eminem’s chilling ’97 Bonnie and Clyde, which becomes increasingly sinister as it transpires that the rap’s narrator has taken his infant daughter along to help him dispose of her mother’s corpse: “Don’t worry bout that little boo-boo on her throat”.

Bad Dad: “Accessory to Murder” looks bad on a nursery school application form.

13 Willy Loman

A “phoney little fake” is how Biff Loman sees his father in Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman. Adulterous and unsuccessful, Willy Loman sets his two sons a poor example and offers lousy advice in life. Even in death he fails them: suicide invalidates his life insurance policy.

Bad Dad: Clearly, a “low man”.

14 Saturn

One of the 14 “Black Paintings” septuagenarian Francisco Goya painted onto the walls of “Deaf Man’s Villa” outside Madrid during fits of hysteria from 1819-1823, Saturn Devouring His Son is a terrifying, gory rendering of the Greek myth of the God who made dead sure his kids wouldn’t supplant him.

Bad Dad: Appalling table manners for starters.

15 Don Vito Corleone

Hypnotically portrayed by mumblin’ Marlon Brando, Don Corleone puts a fresh spin on traditional ''family’’ values in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 mafia movie classic The Godfather. Sure, all fathers harbour hopes that the children will take on the family business, but they don’t all make offers you can’t refuse.

Bad Dad: Although when he gets into the heroin business he does try to stop it being sold to children.

16 King Laius

“There once lived a man named Oedipus Rex/ You may have heard about his odd complex/ His name appears in Freud’s index/ 'cause he loved his mother.” So sang Tom Lehrer of Sophocles’ tragic king, completely failing to mention that he also slew his poor father, Laius. As prophesied.

Bad Dad: Modern parenting manuals discourage pinning a baby’s ankles together and leaving it on a mountainside.

17 Guido Orefice

Roberto Benigni co-wrote, directed and starred in the 1997 Oscar-winning film Life Is Beautiful about a charismatic Italian Jew who convinces his young son that the Nazi concentration camp in which they are imprisoned is all a big game. With monumental courage and unflagging imagination, Guido maintains his protective fiction to the end.

Pop Idol: When his son complains about the train journey to the camp, he tells the Nazis, “We’re taking the bus back!”

18 “Daddy”

“Not God but a swastika/ So black no sky could squeak through”, wrote Sylvia Plath in the suffocating “Daddy”, a 1966 poem that Plath famously described as being about “a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God.”As the poem develops, father becomes husband, continuing the heart- stomping cycle.

Bad Dad: He just did not do.

19 Alfred P Doolittle

A man who lives up to his name, Eliza’s dustman dad in Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” takes no responsibility for his daughter’s welfare, sponges off the poor flower girl when he fancies a spree and practically pimps her to Professor Higgins. But he gets by on charm… and a little bit of bloomin’ luck.

Pop Idol: “The most original moralist at present in England”. Ahem.

20 Jimmy McNulty

When whisky-slugging McNulty – from HBO cop drama The Wire – first sees the children’s toys in the house of his girlfriend Beadie Russell, he heads for the door. He overcomes his fear of commitment to move in with her later, but is it a good sign that the kids call him by his surname?

Bad Dad: When he should be putting his boys to bed, he’s invariably holed up in a bar putting away a few single malts instead.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk - http://tinyurl.com/mqdjdd