Alan Cumming, an actor for all ages

(CBS News) If you haven't seen Alan Cumming in "The Good Wife," don't worry: You've almost certainly seen the 47-year-old actor in something else at the movies, on stage or on TV. Serena Altschul has a Sunday Profile:

Alan Cumming ia an actor for the ages . . . all ages. Whether he's playing to kids looking for a few laughs, or adults looking for action or drama.

So when Altschul sat down with Cumming, she had a lot of ground to cover, from "Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion" to playing a computer programmer in the James Bond film "GoldenEye." ("It was such fun - Boris Grishenko"). Or "Josie and the Pussycats," in which both Cumming and Altschul appeared.

When Cumming is asked a simple question, you never know where it'll lead.

"Your body of work," Altschul began, "when we look at all of the - "

"Are we talkin' about my body already, Serena?"

"We had to get there eventually, didn't we?" she laughed.

Every week on TV, Cumming plays Eli Gold, a bare-knuckles political consultant on "The Good Wife."

"What's it like for you getting into his character - he's explosive, he gets angry, he really gets in there. Is that fun to play him?" Altschul asked.

"I like him," Cumming replied. "The good thing about him is he's very repressed. I love having a laugh with the crew between takes, and then when I do him I'm very . . . a lot of eyebrows!"

But Cumming always comes back to the theater - this year, in a provocative one-man production of "Macbeth." After all, it was theater that first made him a star in this country.

He played the Master of Ceremonies in "Cabaret" in 1998. "It was an amazing thing for me. It kind of completely changed my life," he said.

Cumming and Altschul sat down in the same building where he performed in "Cabaret." In the late '70s it was the notorious club "Studio 54." It has since become a theater.

"Cabaret" became a nationwide sensation, and Cumming won a Tony Award. "You know what I thought was amazing? I would go to somewhere in the middle of America - this is before I'd done films that they knew - and I'd go into the cafe and they'd say, 'You're the "Cabaret" guy.' And I'd say, 'Oh, did you see the show?' And they're like, 'No.'"

Cumming was raised far from the big city lights, in a smallish town in Scotland.

"It wasn't a town," he said. "I grew up in a country estate."

"Country estate" sounds like the setting for an idyllic Scottish childhood. It wasn't.

"I have so few memories of my childhood," he said. "It's really weird, it's because I didn't want to make them memories because it was so painful."

Cumming says he and his big brother were terrorized by their father, who tended the forest at the estate.

"My childhood wasn't happy. My dad's very, you know, troubled person and violent and stuff like that. And I think in a funny sort of way I had a very - it sounds weird, but a very balanced childhood. I had my father telling me I was worthless and my mum told me I was precious.

"And so, you know, I didn't believe either of 'em!"

Theater classes gave him a way out. "When I started to act, it was something that I was good at," he said. "And also other people would tell me I was good at it. So my father, he couldn't just be the authority, do you know what I mean?"

In school he met and married actress Hilary Lyon. The marriage lasted eight years.

But he's described himself as being bisexual, and five years ago he married Grant Shaffer, a graphic artist.

"I think people associate with me [an] easiness with myself, comfort with myself, openness about many things, including my sexuality. And I think that people connect to that and I think they like me for that. So I think, if anything, my career - to be in a very mercenary kind of agent-y way - it's been a good thing for me to be as open as I have been, and to be out in that way."

These days Cumming couldn't appear more settled-down, as he walks around his Manhattan neighborhood with his two dogs, Honey and Leon.

"I still go out and have fun, but I'm not as crazy as I used to be, I think," Cumming said.

"So you don't miss the wilder times?" Altschul asked.

"I still have wild times," he replied.

He's got a saying he's fond of repeating: "Everything in moderation, including moderation."

But he's not terribly moderate in his new film, "Any Day Now." He plays a drag queen, half of a gay couple prevented in court from rescuing a disabled boy.

After being given numerous gay-rights awards, Cumming felt the film spoke to basic human rights. "I want to live in a world that I feel is right. And I think it's about being Scottish, actually. We have a really big sense of sniffing out injustice."

But then we get back to the fun - and off-color - side of Alan Cumming.

He has a fragrance line (his second fragrance is called the 2nd Cumming), which Altschul describred as a "very approachable" fragrance.

"I may be naughty, but I have substance behind my naughtiness," he said. .

He brings many of his sides together in photographs he started marketing this year.

It all adds up to one complicated personality.

"I don't want to over psychoanalyze you - " Altschul said.

"But let's, I've spent all this money all these years!" Cumming replied. "We might as well do it on TV."

"This, you know, lack of memory of your childhood and this kind of empty span of time where you just have little punctuated bits of memory, do you feel like you have a childlike quality to you, a playfulness?"

"Yes."

"Do you feel like part of that part of your personality is kind of recapturing time lost?"

"I do think that. I think in a funny sort of way, I had to grow up. I had my life backwards in a way. I mean I think a lot of people have this kind of quality. And as they grow older it gets more muted. And with me it's kind of the opposite way. As I've got older I'm more - "

"Getting louder and louder."

"Yeah, because I'm more able to be who I am," Cumming said.

And if Alan Cumming thinks he's just in the process of opening up, watch out.

"How many careers can you squish into one man?" Altschul laughed.

"I'm not done yet, Serena," he replied.

For more info:

• alancumming.com
• alancummingphotography.com
• "Any Day Now"
• "Macbeth" (National Theatre of Scotland)