Alan Cumming on abusive father: “My whole life has been imbued with the fact that my father didn’t love me”

The multi-talented Alan Cumming has, for the first time, gone public about growing up with a physically and emotionally abusive father who left him living in fear and shame.

‘When he was abusing me, it was the only time he really noticed me,’ Cumming tells dot429. ‘So there’s that whole weirdness that was going on. My whole life has been imbued with the fact that my father didn’t love me. It’s a huge thing in my life.’

Is it possible that his father did love him but did not know how to show it?

‘My father was a monster … whether he loved me or not,’ the actor says.

Cumming, currently on Broadway in Cabaret and on the CBS drama The Good Wife, found the time to share painful family memories in the memoir Not My Father’s Son out this week.

The Tony Award-winning actor learned a lot through the writing process.

‘I don’t know why my mother and brother and I have to continue to protect him, which is what I discovered we were doing as I was writing the book,’ he says. ‘It was such a huge thing that happened to us. We should acknowledge it.’

Cumming’s father is now dead and the actor acknowledges it makes going public far easier.

‘Actually, I was nervous about my father’s anger about my deciding to write about it,’ he admits. ‘But he’s not going to be angry because he’s not here. He had to be dead, in a way, though, for me to do it.

‘It all had to be contained thoroughly in the past. The past had to be its own entity. What I wanted to say is that all this happened to me. It is a part of who I am. If you think you know who I am, it will shock you. Even if you don’t know who I am, it is shocking.’

Cumming observes the longer that abuse goes on in a family, ‘the more it goes unchecked and is not commented on or dealt with – it becomes regular. It becomes normal. It becomes acceptable.

‘So what I am doing with my story is that by putting it out into the world, it will never be acceptable. People will be reading it and going, “My God,” and maybe some people will realize that their own abuse in their own lives is not acceptable either.’