Life’s not always a cabaret for Alan Cumming

Alan Cumming, the gregarious Scottish actor who is currently playing Emcee in Cabaret on Broadway to standing ovations and is filming a new series of the Emmy-winning The Good Wife, in which he plays sharp-suited spin doctor Eli Gold, is raking his dark hair with his fingers.

Cumming’s slight edginess is understandable considering the prospect of discussing the very personal content of his memoir, in which he reveals the cruelty that he, his brother Tom and mother Mary received at the hands of his father.

Alex Cumming, a brute of a man, systematically taunted and terrorised his family and openly refused to ever process what he had done. His idea of giving the young Alan a haircut was to shave his head with a pair of rusty sheep shears, holding him down like an animal and cutting his skin. He’d set him tasks with little or no instruction and beat him when he didn’t do them properly.

“His actual violence towards us rarely lasted beyond one or two really hard whacks, the odd kick,” Cumming, 49, writes in his memoir Not My Father’s Son. “I actually think the prolonged period of tension before landing his blows, as we were systematically inspected, chided and humiliated, had a far worse effect than the actual hits.”

Mary left her abusive husband – who promptly installed his lover in her place – when Cumming was 19 and at drama school in Glasgow. The couple later divorced. The savagery, Cumming’s escape into acting, and his efforts to understand his father’s actions are all documented in the book, along with the efforts that he and Tom made, unsuccessfully, to try to re-establish a relationship with him later on.

After no contact for 16 years, another bombshell was dropped in 2010 when Alan agreed to appear on the BBC show Who Do You Think You Are? His father, by then dying of cancer, rang his brother, telling him that Alan was not his son. He said he didn’t want it to come out in the programme. Alan and Tom decided to take DNA tests, to see if their father’s claims were true – I won’t spoil the book by revealing the result.

The terrorisation had many repercussions in Cumming’s adult life. In the early Nineties, he had a nervous breakdown, which he calls ‘Nervy B’, stemming from all those years of tense silence, all those years of bottling things up.

At that point, he’d been married for seven years to actress Hilary Lyon when they decided to try for a baby – but the notion of becoming a father sparked memories of his own traumatic experiences growing up.

“The issues around having a child brought up the memories of what had happened. It manifested itself in severe depression, anxiety and powerlessness. I stopped eating. Then I slowly realised that what it was about was to do with my dad, and that was really terrifying,” he recalls.

He started having panic attacks, became agitated and irritable, and alienated himself from his wife. They ended up divorcing. He holed himself away to try to sort himself out and ended up having a lot of therapy. Work, friends and family have helped him through it.

Today, his life is busier than ever, what with TV and theatre work, as well as his ‘Club Cumming’ after-parties in his dressing room, where celebrities, cast members, friends and hangers-on keep the revelry going until the early hours, as documented on his Instagram feed.

“Sometimes, because of the parts I’ve played, people think I want to jump [up] and make a speech, but I don’t. I love Club Cumming in my dressing room at Studio 54 when it’s with people I know. I like letting go.”

His childhood may have been without joy, but he is making up for lost time. He has lived in New York for 16 years and is in the process of renovating a town house in the East Village in Manhattan. He also has a pad in Edinburgh, but doesn’t return much because of work, he says.

“New York’s a city of people who are different. It embraces oddballs. I would never want to live in Los Angeles, which is just a work town. New York is a really exciting city because people are interested in the world. LA’s just interested in the entertainment industry and money.”

That said, Cumming has worked hard for a long time. In fact, his career spans three decades and includes blockbuster movies such as X-Men, Goldeneye, and the Spy Kids trilogy, as well as TV appearances in Frasier and Third Rock From The Sun. Cumming is also a theatre stalwart, starring most recently in Hamlet and Cabaret on Broadway alongside Hollywood actresses Michelle Williams and Emma Stone. He feels most at home in the big apple.

“I was in LA a while ago and a waiter came up to me and said, ‘Congratulations Alan’, and I said, ‘Oh why, did I win an award?’ And he said, ‘Oh no, your movie took 25,000 dollars at the box office this weekend’, and I thought, ‘How do you know that?’ I was horrified that the waiter knew that.”

In parallel with the story of his father, in the book he charts the fascinating account of what became of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Darling, a decorated soldier who died in a ‘shooting accident’ in Malaya shortly after the war, aged just 35. It turned out he was playing Russian roulette. Another shock for Cumming.

Perhaps there were mental health issues among men on both sides of the family? He has considered it.

“Tommy was a great, respected and decorated soldier, but also a daredevil, a cheeky chap, and in search of something. He was charismatic and quite reckless, and I’m quite reckless.I wonder if the reason my granny and I were so close is because she saw a bit of him in me.”

But the actor also has a dark side, he admits, something he’s worked hard at eradicating.

“I went under for a while but I don’t worry about it now,” he says. “The situation with my dad gave us some ammunition about how to deal with people’s violence and rage. In my life, and especially in some of the work I do, there’s a propensity to slip into a dark place and I’m very conscious of that.”

He now believes that his father, who died in 2010, was mentally ill.

That thought helps him cope with the memory of how cruel he was. “It’s not a salve but it makes it easier to release it. He was psychotic – a nasty, vindictive tyrant.”

He says in the book that he’s forgiven his father. It’s clear though, that he will never forget. “In writing the book I’ve brought him back into my life, and he will be there forever,” says Cumming. “I’m not putting it to bed. In a way, that’s my intention.”

Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming, priced Dh110 at Magrudy’s.