Celebrities Who Have Contentious Relationships With Their Fathers

It's easy to forget that most of our favorite celebrities have non-celebrity relatives, parents and siblings who watch from the sidelines as the family's star basks in the limelight. With the exception of the Kardashians, stars' relatives tend to avoid the spotlight, preferring the regular life provided by anonymity. Of course, there have been those who have viewed their famous relatives' stardom as a launching pad to become celebrities in their own right. 

For example, who can forget the constant embarrassment that Billy Carter brought down on his brother during President Jimmy Carter's tenure as president? Or how Sylvester Stallone, while climbing the Hollywood ladder, was forced to contend with his loose-cannon mom, Jackie Stallone, who, when she wasn't sharing humiliating details about her son during interviews to Howard Stern, was attempting to cash in with her own Miss Cleo-style psychic telephone hotline. Of course, in some cases, it's their fathers whom stars have taken issue with, whether it's for childhood abuse, financial skullduggery, political differences, or even something as basic as a personality clash. Read on for a look at the celebrities who have contentious relationships with their fathers.

While Drew Barrymore is recognized as a star in her own right, she's descended from a famed family of actors. Her father, John Drew Barrymore, was the son of movie icon John Barrymore, part of a legendary acting dynasty that also included Lionel Barrymore and Ethel Barrymore. As she divulged in her memoir, "Wildflower," her dad was pretty much out of the picture, having separated from her mother before she was born. "The truth is I never lived with my father," she wrote. "I never even had a dinner with both of my parents. I never knew the whole story of how my parents met and got together."

While Drew gained early fame as a child star courtesy of her role in "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," her relationship with her father was far from great. That was largely due to his personality, as free a spirit as ever existed — along with an addiction to alcohol and a tendency to become violent when under the influence. "My father never had an apartment," she wrote. "No address to send a letter. No phone to call him if the mood struck." 

Regardless of his shortcomings as a father, Drew intrinsically understood that he was never cut out to be a parent and never held a grudge about his behavior. "My mom chose a wild card for my dad," she wrote in a 2020 Instagram post honoring her father, who died in 2004 at age 72. "He was a mad poet hedonist man child! But I understood that as a kid. Somehow I have zero baggage or dad issues."

Angelina Jolie's parents are Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight and French actor Marcheline Bertrand. Their marriage, however, crumbled due to Voight's infidelity. "I had an affair, and there was a divorce," Voight once recalled, per The Independent. "There was a lot of hurt and anger." After the couple officially divorced in 1980, Jolie and her brother grew up essentially in a single mother's home, with her dad mostly absent from their lives.

Since then, the relationship between Jolie and Voight has gone up and down. They mended fences in the early 2000s and even starred together in the 2001 film "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider." Their relationship, however, hit the skids after Voight told "Access Hollywood" about Jolie's unspecified "mental problems" in a 2002 interview (via Entertainment Weekly). She responded by issuing a statement: "I don't want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father," she said, adding, "I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father." The riff between Voight and his daughter extended to her older brother, James Haven. 

In 2007, Voight issued a statement to People in which he blamed his ex-wife for poisoning their children against him. "I find it very heartbreaking that my children want to paint a bad portrait of me," he said. "I feel that it comes from their inability to let go of years of programmed anger from their mother, who understandably felt quite hurt when we divorced." Jolie softened her stance toward her dad in the years after that, but his vocal support of Donald Trump and her own support of Palestine appeared to create another wedge between them. "She's been exposed to propaganda," Voight told Variety in 2024.

When delving into the untold truth of Jennifer Aniston, it's clear that she's had a complicated relationship with her parents. While Aniston has publicly commented on the fraught relationship with her mother, Nancy Dow, she's also had some rough patches when it comes to her dad, John Aniston. After the "Days of Our Lives" star's heartbreaking death in 2022, Jennifer revealed that a key factor that motivated her pursuit of success as an actor was simply to receive her father's approbation. "Always wanting to get Pop's approval — it was the thing that drove me and was also my biggest heartbreak: trying to impress and prove your value to a man who's only capable of so much," she recalled in a 2025 interview with Vanity Fair. 

If she finally made her mark as an actor, she believed that only "then he will love me as much as I love him." Ultimately, "Friends" propelled Jennifer to levels of stardom far beyond anything her father had achieved. That led to some occasions when the approval she dreamed of actually arrived, when he admitted just how proud her was of her and everything that she'd achieved. "We had a few of those moments," she shared.

Born Robyn Rihanna Fenty in Barbados, she embarked on a music career by going full mononym as Rihanna. We all know how that went: Rihanna became a music superstar with her own wildly lucrative fashion and beauty lines. Rihanna's parents, Ronald Fenty and Monica Braithwaite, divorced when she was 14 years old. In 2009, Rihanna shared that her father had a history of domestic violence toward her mother.

Fenty publicly raised his daughter's ire when he gave an interview to Heat magazine in which he praised Rihanna's ex, singer Chris Brown, years after Brown pled guilty to charges of savagely beating her. "'Chris is a nice guy, and everybody's entitled to make mistakes in their life," Fenty said (via Today.com), adding that he found his daughter to be a bit "fat" when he'd last seen her. Those eyebrow-raising comments threw Rihanna for a loop. "You grow up with your father, you know him, you are a part of him, for goodness' sakes!" she told Vogue (via Billboard). "And then he does something so bizarre that I can't begin to wrap my mind around it."

They subsequently hashed things out, but their relationship soured once again in 2019, when Rihanna sued her father. She claimed he'd been using her name to drum up business opportunities for himself by taking credit for booking her $15 million Latin American tour — which he had nothing to do with. "Although Mr. Fenty is Rihanna's father, he does not have, and never has had, authority to act on Rihanna's behalf," read the lawsuit (via The Blast). Fenty died in May 2025 at age 70. 

Britney Spears' pop music career took off in 1998 when "...Baby One More Time" topped the charts. Just a few years later, however, her parents — father Jamie Spears and mother Lynne Spears — divorced (sister Jamie Lynn Spears later revealed that Britney was instrumental in her parents' split, offering to buy her mother a house if she divorced her father).

When Britney's high-profile breakdown led her to be placed in a conservatorship, her father took charge of her affairs. During those years, their father-daughter relationship appeared solid — until she began investigating. The more she learned about the conservatorship, the more she wanted to distance her father from her finances. In 2020, she filed legal documents formally requesting that Jamie be removed as conservator. In the court filing, her attorney, Samuel Ingham III, wrote that Britney "is strongly opposed to having [Jamie] return as the conservator of her person" (via Us Weekly). During a subsequent hearing Ingham dropped a bombshell. "My client has informed me that she is afraid of her father," stated Ingham, as reported by Us Weekly.  "She also stated that she will not perform as long as her father is in charge of her career." 

In 2021, Britney claimed her conservatorship was even sadder than we originally thought, accusing her father of body-shaming her and attempting to control every minute aspect of her life — even prohibiting her from drinking coffee. When she'd appeared in court, NBC News reported that she claimed she was "extremely scared" of her father, complaining that "this conservatorship has allowed my dad to ruin my life." Britney's conservatorship was finally terminated in November 2021, 14 years later.

After charming audiences with "The Parent Trap" and "Freaky Friday," Lindsay Lohan's success as a child star was soon overshadowed by her out-of-control behavior as a young adult. That period included several arrests, numerous trips to rehab, and four instances of parole violation. Over the years, Lindsay has often been on the outs with her father, Michael Lohan. That was certainly the case in 2009, when he leaked an embarrassing private phone conversation. That led her to fire back on social media, calling him a "loser" (via TMZ). A few years later, Michael insisted that her personal problems had been caused by him and ex-wife Dina Lohan during their bitter divorce. "It's my fault and Dina's fault. We put her in the middle of the divorce," he told Life & Style in 2013 (via CTV News).

When Michael was sentenced to nine months in prison in 2025 — for violating parole on a previous conviction after he was arrested and charged with assaulting ex-wife Kate Major — Lindsay was far from sympathetic. In fact, the truth about Lindsay's relationship with her father was that she'd apparently had it with him and his antics. It was Major who'd been putting money into his prison commissary account, not his daughter. "Lindsay has completely cut herself off from Michael's chaos," a source told the National Enquirer.

The success of "Home Alone" propelled Macaulay Culkin to mega-stardom at a young age. The son of Kit Culkin and Patricia Brentrup (they never married), Macaulay was one of five kids and quickly found himself the family's breadwinner. It was while taking charge of his son's career that Kit reportedly clashed with producers. There were numerous allegations about his awful behavior on the set of his son's film, "The Nutcracker," which included demanding multiple script and billing changes that ultimately caused two directors to flee and blew up the budget. "It was ludicrous," Robert Krasnow, then head of Elektra Entertainment, told The New York Times in 1993.

The ex-child star also has nothing good to say about his dad. "My father was always, you know, abusive, but it didn't get really, really, really bad until later on," he told New York Magazine in 2001. The former child star reiterated those claims during a 2018 appearance on "WTF with Marc Maron." "He was abusive, physically and mentally — I can show you all my scars if I wanted to," said Macaulay (via Page Six). These days, Kit Culkin is persona non grata in his son's life. "He's a s***ty guy," he told Esquire in 2020. "He's the worst person I have ever known in my entire life," Culkin said in 2025 on the "Sibling Revelry" podcast (via "Entertainment Tonight"), adding he and his father hadn't spoken in more than three decades. Meanwhile, Kit hasn't exactly gone out of his way to make amends. "I don't consider him a son anymore," Kit told the Daily Mail in 2016.

During Goldie Hawn's brief marriage to musician Bill Hudson (of The Hudson Brothers fame), the couple welcomed two children, Oliver and Kate Hudson. Shortly after Kate's arrival, they separated, ultimately divorcing in 1982. According to the "Almost Famous" star, her father wasn't much of a presence in her life when she was a child, and relations have always been strained. 

That became apparent in 2015, when Oliver took to Instagram on Father's Day to share a throwback photo of himself, his sister, and their dad. "Happy abandonment day," he wrote in the caption. That led their father to issue a blunt response. "I had five birth children, but I now consider myself a father of three. I no longer recognize Oliver and Kate as my own," he told the Daily Mail, encouraging the two actors to stop using his surname. "They are no longer a part of my life," he continued. "Oliver's Instagram post was a malicious, vicious, premeditated attack. He is dead to me now. As is Kate." Nearly a decade later, when interviewed by "CBS Sunday Morning" in 2024, Hudson was asked what her relationship with her dad was like. "I don't have one," she declared, but she did admit the chill was thawing a bit. "It's warming up," she said.

When LeAnn Rimes catapulted to stardom at age 13, her father, Wilbur C. Rimes, steered her career. This became problematic when the young singer and her mother — who'd recently divorced Wilbur — began to suspect he'd been ripping LeeAnn off. In 2000, 17-year-old LeAnn sued her father, alleging that he and co-manager Lyle Walker had embezzled $7 million. "It would appear that her father didn't always act in a fatherly way to her," LeAnn's attorney, Tom Rhodus, told the Dallas Morning News (via New York Post), with the suit claiming the pair were taking 30% off the top of her earnings rather than the 10% industry standard. "[They] wrongfully usurped millions of dollars ... for their own benefit," Rhodus added. 

Wilbur responded in a decidedly non-paternal manner, hitting his daughter with a counterclaim that really raked the muck. In that suit, he claimed the singer trashed a $350,00 Bentley, spent $10,000 each time she got her hair done, and used her credit card to buy booze when underage. Her lawyer, J. Cary Gray, fired back. "The document that Mr. Rimes filed is so full of false and misleading statements that are totally unrelated to this case ... that the only reason he could possibly have filed this lawsuit is to humiliate his daughter so much that she would let him get away with this outrageous behavior," Gray told USA Today (via ABC News). The suits were settled the following year. Father and daughter reconciled, reportedly due to her desire for her father to walk her down the aisle at her 2002 wedding to dancer Dean Sheremet. 

There's apparently little love lost between Brie Larson and father Sylvain Desaulniers. As the "Captain Marvel" star declared in a 2016 interview with Elle, at that point they hadn't spoken in 10 years — and that was perfectly fine with her. "When legally I didn't have to have visitation with him anymore, I jumped on it," she told the magazine, referring to her parents' divorce when she was just 7 years old. 

Without getting into details, Larson hinted at some bad behavior that she'd endured — and was refusing to endure again. "As a kid, I tried to understand him and understand the situation. But he didn't do himself any favors," she added. "I don't think he ever really wanted to be a parent. It wasn't until truly recently that I realized that's why so much of my work was so volatile." Desaulniers, too, had nothing but good things to say about his estranged daughter when speaking with the Daily Mail that same year, though he insisted her claims they hadn't spoken in a decade were exaggerated. "It's inaccurate," he said. 

When it comes to daddy-daughter dysfunction, it's tough to top Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, and her estranged dad, Thomas Markle. The moment she began dating Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, she became a tabloid target — as did her father. He was reportedly supposed to walk his daughter down the aisle — but didn't, either because he needed to undergo heart surgery (his claim) or (according to reports) because he was disinvited after being caught red-handed staging photos for a tabloid. Thomas claimed he'd been desperately trying to contact his daughter, who refused to reply. "I had a heart attack, doesn't anybody care? I could actually die soon," he told The Sun, playing the sympathy card. "Does she want this to be the last thing we've said to each other?" 

Thanks to stunts like that, and his continued association with tabloids, the two have remained estranged. During her now-infamous sit-down with Oprah Winfrey, Duchess Meghan offered a comment about her parents' differing approaches to the media that spoke volumes. "Everyone has accountability," she said (via CBS LA). "Look, they've hunted my mom down. And you've never heard her say a word."

In 2025, when her 81-year-old father was hospitalized in the Philippines, his leg amputated due to a potentially fatal infection, he begged his daughter to let bygones be bygones. "I don't want to die estranged," he told the Daily Mail. She reportedly sent him a letter, even though he had apparently not learned his lesson about tabloids. "Given that a Daily Mail reporter has remained at her father's bedside throughout ... it has been exceedingly difficult for the Duchess to contact her father privately," a spokesperson told BBC News.