Gulliver’s Travels at Adelaide Fringe.

I was the PE technician at my old secondary school, so I had to pump up all the balls, wash all the kits and get the form notes in before morning registration every day.

After Emmerdale, babysitting. I freaked out – I couldn’t believe people put me in charge of their children.

In South Africa I washed cars, I danced in parking lots and shopping malls, and was a children’s entertainer.

The Cumming fragrance line. the soap, Cumming in a bar (still available at alancumming.com) is my favorite ever pun on my name.

Biggest lesson; Treat people respectfully. There's a sort of vogue, and there has been for decades now, that the director is god and the director is all knowing.

I realized, I’m not doing it for the audience; I’m doing it for me. I like it. I want to be able to see if I can still do it. I want to see if I can challenge myself. I want to have a good time. With ‘Macbeth,’ I wasn’t finished with it. It wasn’t out of my system.

But when you say to someone, “I don't understand this and I'm asking your advice because you're better at it than me,” by doing that and involving people and making the film truly a collaborative process, you get much better results. You get a better film and you get happier people and get an atmosphere on the set that is truly creative.

I think acting your age is allowing other people to make decisions for you about how you should behave and what is age-appropriate. I encourage people to live and not be tied down with other people's expectations of what you should be doing. If you want to do something, go and do it. We overly worship the altar of youth. It's not good for our mental health. As a culture, we need to get better at seeing the beauty in aging and the beauty in things that are not young.

A couple of summers ago, walking through a forest illuminated by fireflies, with my man and our dogs.