My Dad, the comedy hero

When Mike Myers rushed home from school with his friends, intent on a game of pool in the basement, there was one immovable obstacle they had to surmount first. His father. No one, it seems, was allowed through the front door unless Myers Senior approved of their sense of humour - and if they weren't fans of Monty Python, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and The Goons, they were destined for a long trudge home.

"My heroes of comedy were also those of my father,'" confesses Mike. "Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, The Pythons, Sir Alec Guinness. My dad was a guy who loved to be silly and do daft things. He was a man with a highly developed sense of humour. When I used to bring my mates back home, if he didn't think that they were funny, he wouldn't let them in the house. He'd tell me, 'They can't come around here - they're not bloody funny!'"

It's the British sense of humour that Canadian Myers inherited from his Liverpool-born father that has made him such a success. His Austin Powers, the swinging photographer by day and International Man of Mystery by night, is the living embodiment of everything Americans think an Englishman ought to be. He tells corny sex jokes, has dubious taste in fashion and has the knack of saying the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time.

Austin Powers is a character created and played by Myers, of Wayne's World fame. The last film, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, amassed more than £200 million and now the world is about to go Austin-mad again and kids on every corner will soon be shouting, "Do I make you horny?" with the release next week of the third in the franchise, Goldmember.

But what few people will realise is the serious story behind this farcical invention. For Myers, Austin Powers has become an emotional bond to his late father, the inspiration for his inventively coarse sense of humour. Goldmember is a heartfelt tribute from son to father.

Myers lost his father 10 years ago, aged 59, from complications of Alzheimer's disease. "I was devastated by his death," he says quietly. "The third movie in the series owes its life to a moment last year when I was driving back from hockey practice, and I heard one of his favourite songs on the radio, Burt Bacharach's The Look Of Love (which is incorporated into the movie at the end), and I thought that I'd make it an homage to him. I wrote it in three weeks, and it was amazingly therapeutic. To say that I poured out my heart and feelings into it is an understatement."

He may be earning around $20 million for the latest Austin Powers instalment, but Myers comes from a humble background. He was born in 1963 in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, where his parents had emigrated from Liverpool. Eric Myers had been an army cook, and in Canada worked as an encyclopedia salesman, while maintaining his obsession with all things British. He met Alice, Mike's mother, at an amateur dramatics society - she had previously studied acting at Lamda, a drama school in London, with the intention of going into the theatre.

Her ambitions found an outlet in Mike. From an early age he was taken to auditions and appeared in television commercials. The most important influence on his comedy was his father, who would wake his three sons late at night to watch British shows such as The Goodies and Monty Python.

''My parents had a great marriage, and they kept a really happy house where comedy and a sense of humour was important,'' he says. Myers himself has been happily married to Robin Ruzan since 1993.

Myers often talks about his late father on set, but rarely in interviews. Many of his stories are jolly reminiscences, but some of the stories are much sadder - of a father lost to Alzheimer's.