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Shaun Cassidy is sharing more about his strained relationship with his father, Jack
In a new podcast interview, Shaun said his father’s ego was “his shortcoming”
He added that his father struggled with the fame and success of his sons and wife
Legendary teen idol Shaun Cassidy is opening up about his famously strained relationship with his father, Jack Cassidy.
In the 1970s, Shaun was known for his work on television shows and on arena stages performing hit songs like “Do You Believe in Magic” and “That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll.” He also hailed from a very famous family: his mom is Oscar-winning actress Shirley Jones, 91; his dad is Tony-winning actor Jack Cassidy, who died in an apartment fire in 1976; and his half-brother is fellow teen idol David of The Partridge Family fame, who died in 2017 of liver failure.
In an interview on the podcast Nostalgia Tonight With Joe Sibia, Cassidy noted that his father was “a wildly talented man.”
But while Jack was a “Tony Award-winner on Broadway, actor, singer, Emmy-nominee in TV, famous for playing villains on shows like Columbo,” Shaun noted he also had a difficult time with the success of his own sons and of his wife.
“But he had taken a backseat to my mother,” Shaun said on the podcast. “My mother was an Academy Award winner and a very big movie star before The Partridge Family. And then along comes David. And David becomes kind of the biggest thing in the world for a while. And he had a hard time with it.”
Shaun, 67, continued: “And by the way, that was his shortcoming. A lot of parents would have been very proud of their son or their wife, for that matter.”
“But, you know, my father had a big ego,“ he said. “And I think, like a lot of performers had a sort of core insecurity that he was looking for an audience to fill.”
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Shaun Cassidy, Shirley Jones, David, Ryan and Patrick Cassidy
He added that losing his father when he was young meant that he got to “write the script of how your life with that person would have been, had they lived.”
“I’d like to just write the story that I would have gotten closer with my dad, he would have been proud of me,” he said.
Speaking to PEOPLE in September 2025, Shaun described his father as a bit of a “phony,” at least publicly.
“My dad was so complicated,” the former teen idol said, adding that he and his siblings were baffled by the British accent their father used in interviews as his celebrity rose. “He basically invented this public persona with an accent that didn’t exist in any country ever.”
Shaun added: “He was not a good father — and I don’t say that with disrespect. I just say it with objectivity. And yet I wouldn’t have traded him for the world. I got so many gifts from him, so many.”
Jack died in an apartment fire in 1976. He was 49.
Read the original article on People