Not bad for a daft wee laddie

At one point in the show Cumming moons - his own idea. He explains the decision to bare his bum because he believes ''now and again you should make the audience gasp''.

Making audiences gasp is something he has been doing for a long time, yet he stubbornly remains the blushing bridesmaid who fails to become the blooming bride, always turning up at the church, but never quite making it to the altar. His Hamlet, for instance, which came before Cabaret at the Donmar, was described by the critic, Charles Spencer, as the performance of an actor ''knocking at the door of greatness''. Maybe a Tony will finally open the door.

Of all the thirtysomething Scots actors currently bidding to become household names, Cumming, arguably the most versatile, has turned out the tortoise in the race. His career has been littered with nominations, and he got an Olivier award in 1991 for his performance at the Royal National Theatre in Accidental Death of An Anarchist - yet it is Ewan Macgregor and Bobby Carlyle who are the household names. Perhaps his problem is that he is not a leading man on celluloid, there being something innately sinister, a touch too camp about his film persona.

His attempt at playing a leading man in the 1991 film, Prague, an enigmatic thriller about a Scot's Jew seeking his family's wartime roots written and directed by Ian Sellar, in which his co-star was the French actress, Sandrine Bonaire, won him the best actor prize at the 1992 Atlantic Film Festival, but, although his innocent abroad was compelling, there was no chemistry between him and Bonaire. And he demonstrated, when he took his clothes off for the obligatory sex scene, that, unlike McGregor in pretty well everything, or the deceptively shot Carlyle in The Full Monty, some things are better left unrevealed. Cumming looked a bit like one of those fish which live in caverns deep in the earth who never see the light of day. Prague did not launch him on a leading man cinema career, which he had every reason to hope it might do. Since then it has become clear his strength on screen is as

a character actor of consummate skill, not a leading man .

He was wonderfully creepy as the libidinous haberdasher in Circle of Friends, even more so as the socially ambitious Mr Elton in Emma, and very nasty indeed as a Russian computer nerd in the Bond film, Golden Eye. A Cumming performance never goes unnoticed, but somehow in film he has never managed to display that elusive marquee quality which puts bums on seats and has nothing to do with talent. But he works a lot and will be seen soon with Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller in a highwayman caper, Plunkett and Maclean, as an Austrian Jew possessed by the ghost of a sister killed by the Nazis in For My Baby, and with Rene Russo and Robbie Coltraine in Buddy, playing a chimpanzee trainer.

After the Broadway run of Cabaret ends he wants to direct and star in a film of the story of Brandon Lee, the 31-year-old Glaswegian who fooled the school he was attending into thinking he was a teenager.

Having established himself in Scotland - he could, as so many before him have done, settled for Scottish stardom, the big fish in the little Macshowbiz pool we know so well - he went to London in 1988 with Manfred Karge's play, The Conquest of the South Pole, and stayed. He said once that he felt like an exile, but he had made his choice. ''I have come to live in another country and I'm not going back.'' He explained, by voicing the usual complaint of Scots who ''make it'' outside their homeland, why he could not come home - you can't win because you get accused of ''selling out''.

He is 32, was brought up in Carnoustie, where father was a forester, trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and was married for several years to the actress, Hilary Lyon, who is four years older than he. She was at school with him and also at the RSAMD. Cumming, bright enough to have passed his Highers with a gap year before he could go on to further education, spent it aged 16 working for a pop magazine called Tops, interviewing the likes of Toyah Wilcox, Bucks Fizz, and Lulu. His parents separated when he was 20 and he seems to have spent a fair amount of time on his own as a child, or more accurately keeping out of their way.

He became interested in acting through Dundee Rep and that led to drama school. It looked by the time he left as if he was destined to inherit the mantles of Rikki Fulton and Stanley Baxter. Victor and Barry, the camp cabaret act with Forbes Masson, proved a hit on Scottish television, as did his role as a rotter in the soap, Take the High Road. With Masson he starred in and wrote some of the Tron theatre pantomimes, and they went on to make The High Life, a surreal sit com about a couple of camp air stewards which exploited to the full that love hate relationship British audiences have with outrageous, but essentially safe camp.

The two, who worked together for 12 years as a double act, established a kind of telepathy which allowed them on stage to suss out what the other was about to get up to. He worked with the Tag theatre company, and was a memorable Pip in a production of Great Expectations.

He says he stopped doing television because it took over people's lives. ''When I was in High Road, I used to be pinned against the frozen peas counter in supermarkets by women pointing at me, shouting: 'You leave that wee lassie alone!' '' One gets the impression being pinned down in Sardis by Lauren Bacall or Kathleen Turner will have much the same effect on the man today.

The High Life ended after one series partly because he and Masson started to run out of ideas, partly because of problems with the BBC, but more because the pair had decided it would run for one series only from the outset. Rarity value has bestowed cult status on it.

There is, friends say, a shy side to him, although on the surface he is apparently totally confident. He is, however, very clear about his goals, very organised, and not temperamental, although there is a healthy artistic temperament in the man when things are going wrong. Everyone says he is genuinely nice and remembers people from his past. He may have moved to luvvie London, but he has not been swallowed up by it. Genuinely unspolied by everything that has happened to him is the verdict.

In 1994 he made a well-received short film, Butter, and started to appear regularly in supporting roles in films, the stage having lost its allure - or at least the challenge he says needs to have. One film was Circle of Friends, which launched the careers of Minnie Driver and Chris O'Donnell, on which he met the actress Saffron Burrows. They embarked on a relationship which led to the breakup of his marriage, but it, too, appears to be over and he does not talk about his private life, having learned the hard way. There was a time when media intrusion, as his marriage got into difficulties, proved hard to take, and, like many actors, he is not all that keen on the self or product publicising aspects of his profession.

The question is where does he go next? He is not a ''company'' man. His year with the RSC was uncomfortable and he voiced his opinions pretty frankly about the hierarchy at the end of his time there. He could become the next Gary Oldman or Tim Roth, playing villains in Hollywood movies - he has been given the once over and does have the agents to find him the work - using the cash earned to fund some time on the stage playing something worthwhile or in small, independent films either as actor or director or both.

Stardom is not something actors achieve on their own. It is bestowed on them by audiences. Maybe his ability to reinvent himself - a sign of a good actor says one friend - is to blame for it proving elusive so far. Whatever else he is that rarity - an unsafe actor prepared to take risks, tackle anything.

Talking about the premiere of Golden Eye he revealed he is, in some ways, just another daft laddie at heart. ''It was unbelievable, just so glamorous,'' he said. ''There was little me from Carnoustie sitting next to Judi Dench and telling Tina Turner how much I liked her gold nail varnish. Too surreal. Bats.'' Little me from Carnoustie on Broadway - it could serve as the title for his autobiography.