The Fathers Who Shaped Darth Vader

Darth Vader might have been just another masked villain if not for four words. You know the ones: Luke Skywalker is clinging to a windblown gantry as the masked Imperial monster reaches out and reveals that he did not kill Luke’s father. “I am your father,” Vader intones.

With that revelation in The Empire Strikes Back, the Star Wars galaxy became more than a space adventure about good and evil. It became a metaphor for the age-old conflict between generations. This twist raised a question in the mind of the hero, something also asked by everyone as they grow up and start their own lives: Am I any different?

As I wrote the new book Star Wars Icons: Vader, it became ever clearer that the fatherhood theme was the key factor in the creation and evolution of the most famous screen villain of all time. Fortunately, we had 500 oversize pages to explore the idea. I found that virtually everyone involved in the making of Vader had a compelling fatherhood story that in various ways guided them and shaped their eventual contribution to the character. This is the hidden source of Vader’s strength.

Everyone has a dad, whether you know that person or not, whether they are a force for good or not. It’s a relationship that shapes everyone, which is why Vader resonates so deeply with decades of moviegoers. He is not merely a villain. He is part of the hero’s journey, if only because the hero carries him in his heart, like it or not. We all do the same.

The inspiration for this book goes back nearly 20 years, to when I sat down with George Lucas to talk about dads.

These themes are everywhere in his work. Not only is the Vader/Anakin Skywalker story the emotional core of both the original Star Wars trilogy and the prequels, but fatherhood issues also turn up repeatedly throughout the Indiana Jones series. At the time of the interview, I was at a point in my own life when my wife and I had decided to start a family, so I was eager to talk with Lucas about these storylines, where they came from, and what he thought about them now.

It all traces back to George Lucas. But not the one we’ve already been talking about.

The filmmaker’s father, George Lucas Sr., was born in 1913 and died in 1991. Over the course of his 78 years, he was a loyal son, a devoted husband who raised four children, and a businessman who built a thriving office-supply company. A Depression-era survivor, he was both baffled and annoyed that his only son had zero interest in inheriting it. “He wanted me to go into his business,” George Jr. told me. “I said I’m absolutely not going to do it.”

Instead, young George wanted to make movies. George Sr. objected but couldn’t change his son’s mind. Instead, he started counting the days until his daydreaming son came crawling back. “He thought I was going to fail,” George Jr. said. “Which was reasonable.”

The young filmmaker’s first movie, the dystopian THX-1138, debuted in 1971 and was only a modest success. Then his follow-up, American Graffiti, seemed to be headed toward disaster, with faithless studio executives debating whether to dump it as a TV movie. The teen drama ultimately became a blockbuster and is now a classic coming-of-age tale. That cleared the way for him to make Star Wars, his tribute to the sci-fi fantasies he adored as a kid.

In January 1976, George Jr. flew to London to prep for the shoot. Soon after, their hometown newspaper The Modesto Bee published a business profile on George Sr., announcing he had sold his business and leased his buildings. He was retiring and closing up shop. George Jr. was not coming back.

The father’s empire had ended, just as the son’s was beginning.

“That was his life,” George Jr. told me. “He worked very hard at it. He started out as an errand boy and he ended owning the company, and it was a big deal to him.”

I was gobsmacked. It all suddenly seemed so clear: Join me, and together we will rule the office-supply galaxy of northern California.

Lucas acknowledged the influence, although it may have snuck up on him. Vader did not start out as Luke’s father in the first movie—he was the Jedi who betrayed him. And the early draft of Empire featured Anakin’s ghost. Only later did Lucas decide to make the two father and son. It was obviously something within that was trying to make its way out.

“Both Steven and I do that,” he said, referring to his longtime friend and collaborator Spielberg. “Almost all of our films are about fathers and sons, whether it’s Darth Vader or E.T.”

Let me emphasize: George Sr. was not Darth Vader. He was strict, and like many fathers, then and now, he certainly believed he knew best. He was not maniacal, definitely not a monster. He was like a lot of dads, and his son took their commonplace conflicts and magnified them through the power of myth.

Over and over again, I saw variations on these themes in the people who helped bring Vader to life.

David Prowse, the bodybuilder who played Vader’s physical form. James Earl Jones, who provided the ominous voice. Lawrence Kasdan, the screenwriter of Empire and Return of the Jedi. All of them had complex and dramatic relationships with their fathers, and each ended up where they were through variations on “Join me.”

Some wanted to follow their fathers’ path. Some wanted to avoid it. Sometimes it was a combination. No two stories are alike, but they all have similarities.

George’s father eventually embraced his son’s filmmaking destiny, and by the time he died, his son was a father himself. George Jr. raised three children as a single dad, and he had this advice for me when he heard I was a soon-to-be father.

“The secret is when they turn into the monsters—and you were a monster and impossible, and I was too—don’t do anything or say anything to destroy the relationship,” he said. “Bite your tongue and say, ‘Hey, whatever.’ … They do come back being well-mannered, intelligent people. But if you screw it up early on, you’re never going to enjoy that part when it happens.”

In the ’90s, George Jr. found himself raising teenagers, dealing with the same things he and his father grappled with: expectations, disagreements, clashes with words rather than lightsabers. “Parents try as hard as they can to do the right thing,” he told me. “They don’t want to be Darth Vader. As Luke says, ‘I know there is good in you, and I have faith in you … even though the rest of the universe thinks you’re a schmuck.’ ”

His father had been a hard-charging, work-obsessed president of one company, but after charting a different destiny for himself, he had ended up the head of several massive companies. George Lucas wanted to get back to making movies.

That’s when the prequels emerged, exploring the origins of Vader as young Anakin Skywalker. Even more George Sr. parallels can be found in these movies. The older man grew up in desperate circumstances where dreams were a luxury. Survival was the focus. By his mid-teens, he was caring for his widowed mother in a hardscrabble desert town. Sound familiar?

Then my wife, a librarian and archivist, helped me track down the 1930 census records for Modesto, California. There on Sheet 7B, in the middle of the page, is the entry for 16-year-old George W. Lucas. There was no Sr. at this point. He was the only one.

Under the column marked “Occupation and Industry,” this boy had written: “Mechanic apprentice” in a typewriter repair shop. It still startles me to see that. It’s the same job Jake Lloyd has as the young Anakin, toiling in Watto’s repair shop in The Phantom Menace.

The Vader book explores the full scope of the character, from the original trilogy to the prequels, the comics, the video games, the novels, and the more recent films and TV shows. But throughout the writing, this one census discovery helped me keep focus on the true source of Vader’s power.

I have no doubt that George Jr. loved his father deeply. Otherwise why would he spend his whole life trying so hard to understand him?