december-2010

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UK. He plays Eli Gold, a smooth, well tailored political
advisor brought in to help a former state’s attorney
relaunch his political career following a corruption and
sex scandal. But there is a certain waggishness about the
character that suggests there may be more to him than
meets the eye. “You get to learn a bit more about him as
the current season progresses – a bit about his personal
life, his past life, chinks in his armour, that kind of
thing,” says Cumming of his character.
This summer he agreed to take part in BBC1’s Who Do
You Think You Are? and uncovered part of his own family’s
history. His grandfather, who won a medal for his bravery
during the British retreat from France in 1940 and who
was wounded in battle in Burma later in the war, was an
enigma even to his daughter, Cumming’s mother Mary,
who was a child when he died in 1951, in colonial Malaya.
As Cumming was to discover, the circumstances of
Tommy Darling’s death were considered so shocking
that they were kept even from his wife back home in
Scotland: he had shot himself during a game of Russian
Roulette. “Clearly he had been affected mentally by his