Shaun Cassidy calls late dad Jack Cassidy phony, bad father

Shaun Cassidy is blasting his late father, Jack Cassidy.

In a new interview with People, Shaun, 66, called the Tony Award-winning actor — who died in an apartment fire in 1976 at age 49 — a “phony.”

“My dad was so complicated,” the actor and singer said about Jack. “He basically invented this public persona with an accent that didn’t exist in any country ever.”

Shaun recalled that when Jack got famous and began appearing on talk shows, he’d speak with a borderline-British accent — which confused Shaun and his younger brothers, Patrick, 63, and Ryan, 59.

“Patrick and Ryan and I would be like, ‘What is up with this dude?’” shared. “I mean, it seemed so phony to us, and that wasn’t like who he was. I’m not sure he ever really figured out who he was.”

Shaun went on to declare that Jack “was not a good father.”

“And I don’t say that with disrespect,” the former teen idol continued. “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.”

The “He & She” actor, who shared Shaun with fellow Hollywood star Shirley Jones, 91, was allegedly not involved Shaun’s life when he was growing up.

“I didn’t get the dad who went to my Little League games or took me on camping trips or any of that stuff. My mom did,” Shaun told People. “My mom showed up for a lot of that stuff, but she was also gone a lot. She was making movies around the world. I think one of the reasons she took ‘The Partridge Family’ job is because she wanted to be close to home.”

Shaun added of his parents, “Who they really are is not how they’re perceived by the public anyway. The public has an idea of who they are. If you grow up in a family of show folk, everything is very presentational.”

“I talked to my brothers about this the other day. I had very, very few photographs of our family just sitting around the living room,” Shaun explained. “Almost all the pictures I have were taken by professional photographers, often for magazines.”

“Going out in public with them as a little kid, everyone was in love with my mother, and everybody was sort of dazzled by my father,” Shaun remembered. “I remember being proud of that, feeling like, ‘Oh, isn’t that cool?’”

Jack had another son, actor and musician David Cassidy, from his marriage to his first wife, Evelyn Ward. David died in Nov. 2017 from organ failure after years of alcoholism. He was 67.