Also in 1995 he played Boris Ivanovih Grishenko in the James Bond film GoldenEye.
American audiences first saw him portraying the smarmy Sean Walsh, an unwanted suitor of Minnie Driver's character, in Circle of Friends, an Irish film released in 1995. His feature film debut came in 1992 when he starred alongside Sandrine Bonnaire and Bruno Ganz in Ian Sellar's Prague, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and earned him the Best Actor award at the Atlantic Film Festival and a Scottish BAFTA Best Actor nomination.
Film Ĭumming made his film debut in Gillies MacKinnon's short film Passing Glory in 1986.
Ĭumming said that his difficult childhood taught him how to act by "needing to suppress my own emotions and feelings around him when I was a little boy". Later, Cumming and his brother took DNA tests that proved they were indeed his biological children.
Cumming said that, after his early 20s, he did not have any communication with his father until just before the filming of his episode of the series Who Do You Think You Are? He then found out his father had believed that Cumming was not his biological son. His mother found it impossible to obtain a divorce until she was financially independent. In his autobiography Not My Father's Son, Cumming describes the emotional and physical violence his father inflicted on him in his childhood. Cumming attended Monikie Primary School and Carnoustie High School. His brother is a property manager in Southampton, England. He has a brother, Tom, who is six years older, and a niece and two nephews. He has described the environment as "feudal". His mother, Mary Darling, was an insurance company secretary and his father, Alex Cumming, was the head forester of Panmure Estate, which is located near Carnoustie, on the east coast of Scotland, and is where Cumming grew up. He has also contributed opinion pieces to many publications and performed the cabaret shows, I Bought a Blue Car Today and Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs.Ĭumming was born on 27 January 1965 in Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland. He had a cable talk show called Eavesdropping with Alan Cumming and produced a line of perfumed products labelled "Cumming". In 2021, he appeared in the Apple TV+ series Schmigadoon!Ĭumming has written a novel, Tommy's Tale (2002), an autobiography, Not My Father's Son: A Memoir (2014), and a topical memoir, Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life (2019).
Cumming starred in the 2018–2019 CBS TV series Instinct. Cumming also appeared on The Good Wife, for which he was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and a Satellite Award. On Broadway, he has appeared in The Threepenny Opera, as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret (for which he won a Tony Award), Design for Living, and a one-man adaptation of Macbeth.Ĭumming's film roles include his performances in Emma, GoldenEye and as Nightcrawler in X2 (X-Men 2), Loki in Son of the Mask, and as Fegan Floop in the Spy Kids trilogy. His London stage appearances include Hamlet, the Maniac in Accidental Death of an Anarchist (for which he received an Olivier Award), the lead in Bent, The National Theatre of Scotland's The Bacchae and Samuel Beckett's Endgame at The Old Vic opposite Daniel Radcliffe.
Alan Cumming OBE FRSE (born 27 January 1965 ) is a Scottish actor.