Golden Globe winning actor Brian Cox has revealed how he was caught red-handed when he bunked off school.

His love of cinema saw him play truant from school in Dundee so he could go and see the stars of the silver screen, but one particular night saw police out on patrol looking for him in the small hours.

The Scots actor, who has picked up awards for his role as media mogul Logan Roy in American drama Succession, grew up with film and visits to Dundee cinemas.

“I remember going to see Giant,” he said. “I bunked off from school, slept through three performances and woke up at 4am in a panic and broke out of the cinema and ran along to the High Street. There was a Tardis, a policeman’s box, and suddenly this voice said ‘where are going?’

Read more: Sir Billy Connolly: I can't perform the way I used to. It doesn't roll the way it used to.

“And I said 'oh sorry I fell asleep and I am going home as my sisters will be worried.' He said ‘we know your sisters are worried about you, we have had half the police force out looking for you.’”

It is no surprise Cox spent much of his time at the movies as at one time Dundee was home to 25 cinemas at the peak of cinema-going in the 1950s. It had more cinemas and cinema seats per head of population than anywhere else in the UK and Cox had visited every one of them.

Speaking to broadcaster Janice Forsyth for the latest in the Great Scot podcast series for The Big Light, Cox added: “I lived in Brown Constable Street and if you came out and turned right you came to Arthur Stone Street which had an iron foundry on one side and next to that was the Royal Cinema and next to my church, St Patrick’s was the Broadway. The Royal and the Broadway had double features so I could see as many as eight movies in a week. I also went to Green’s Playhouse.

“It just got into my system and that is why I always wanted to be an actor. I was partly to do with my dad who put me on the bunker at home and I was doing Jolson impersonations when I was two. Getting the adulation of the audience, but it was also to do with those cinemas that I went to.

“It was the American films that appealed to me, usually with American Irish actors James Cagney and Spencer Tracey.

“He was my go to as an actor and seeing young Marlon Brando and James Dean. They were my cultural sanctuary for when I was a wee boy.”

Read more: Sir Billy Connolly reveals his favourite roll filling - do you agree with him?

The 74-year-old has enjoyed success in numerous stage, film and TV roles, but admits the only person who would be impossible to play would be Donald Trump, adding: "Trump us such an extremely bad script you can’t do anything with it.”

After months in lockdown in his home in New York state, where he later discovered he had coronavirus as anti-bodies had been detected, Cox returned home to Scotland to see family.

He added: “I live in America and it is a troubled country to say the least and getting more and more troubled as we speak, but at the same time the land where we live is as near as Scotland as you could hope for. However, it is not Scotland and I get here and I take the road from the airport up the A9 up to Aberfeldy and I say I am in Scotland there is just something about it.

“I don’t know it has always been a tussle for me because as a wee boy I used to look at the River Tay and I used to say I can’t wait to cross it, I can’t wait to get across that water and now is it the opposite, I can’t wait to go the other way.

“I don’t know if I would ever live here again because of the damp and I have arthritis, but there is something about the land which is undeniable.”

Tragedy struck the family when Cox was just eight years old when his father died, but while it was hard it shaped who he became.

Cox added: “I always knew I wanted to perform in some way really, to be an actor. My life was not easy, I was fine up until the time that my dad died and my mum got really ill and I had to deal with that. I had these great sisters.

“I got a letter from someone who said your father helped my mother and father when they were very young. They were teenage bride and groom and your dad got them a place to live and gave them regular tick.

“Tick was my father’s undoing because people would go into his shop and people would say that’s fine we will put it on the tick and unfortunately a lot of people didn’t pay their bill.

It was tough for him and it was tough because he died so young and there was a lot of stuff we had to sort out and my dear old ma just couldn’t cope with it, so it was not very nice.”

Cox now offers the benefit of his experience to acting students.

He added: “When I teach acting classes I say to the students it is important to have a photograph of yourself as a wee boy or wee girl because it reminds you that’s who you are. That is in essence exactly who you are and you haven’t altered very much. You have a acquired a lot of stuff, you have put on weight, you have got taller you have lost your hair, but that wee boy, that wee girl is who you are and that is what you have got to remember.”

Despite the pain of losing his father at the age of eight and his mother becoming ill, Cox is grateful for his childhood.

“It made me independent and I had to rely on myself and trust who I was and follow my intuition.”

To hear the podcast go to https://www.thebiglight.com/greatscot