Cumming: I feared that my tyrant father would murder me
SCOTS actor Alan Cumming has revealed how he feared he might perish at the hands of his tyrant father.
The 57-year-old star, best known for his role as fast-talking political aide Eli Gold in The Good Wife, tells today’s edition of Desert Island Discs: ‘Sometimes I had terror for my life – when you think, “Oh my God, I am going to die here”.
‘My dad was very violent to us. He was out of control. He didn’t care what my mum thought, or my brother and I. He was very abusive, mentally, emotionally, and very physically to me and my brother.’
Cumming said his father Alex – who worked as a forester on a Perthshire country estate – was ‘obsessed with my hair’.
He explained: ‘It would start off sort of like, you know, you need a haircut. It would go from that to him dragging me by the collar outside into a shed, getting sheep shears out of a drawer and just shearing my head. I mean, just insane – he seemed to get great pleasure from hurting me.
‘When I’d go to get my hair cut as an adult, I would vomit.’
Cumming, who shot to fame in the 1990s sitcom The High Life before finding stellar success on both sides of the Atlantic, said he had spent his childhood ‘constantly on edge’ about what his father might do next.
The star says he was close to his mother Mary and now realises his father was mentally ill, although he was still an expert at covering up his reign of terror. He said: ‘A good abuser makes the people he’s abusing protect him.
‘You are so ashamed of what’s happening to you that you actually go out of your way not just to pretend to yourself but to pretend to people. So, we all did that and also she was terrified too.
‘My dad literally told me I was worthless, and my mum told me I was precious. I knew she was doing it because she meant it but also she was trying to counter my dad. But I knew they couldn’t both be right.
‘In a funny sort of way the two ends of that spectrum made me feel I had to make up my own mind about myself and about life.’ He later tried to seek some sort of reconciliation with his father but his efforts failed and in 2010 – shortly before his father died of cancer – Cumming Senior insisted he was not actually the star’s father.
The claim led to an explosive last phone call in which the actor branded his father a ‘coward’.
Cumming, who proved the paternity accusation to be false, thinks his father had actually convinced himself he was not his son.
He said: ‘I eventually had this DNA test as I didn’t believe him.
‘I then had to phone my dad and tell him and disappoint him that I was his son. The phone call ended, I knew he was dying of cancer, and I told him I thought he was a coward because I had been the one to go and find out the truth and he had used a fallacy that he had believed as a justification to abuse me all these years.’
The actor, who chooses marijuana seeds as his castaway luxury item and whose musical choices range from Kate Bush to pop duo Dollar, recalls ending the final call to his father by saying: ‘I actually won’t talk to you again, but take care.’ lDesert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 today at 11am and will be repeated at 9am on Friday.