Alan Cumming has revealed he gave Madonna a telling off for braiding her hair while she watched one of his Broadway shows.

The actor was performing in Cabaret when he got distracted by the sight of the Who’s That Girl singer fiddling with her locks during the performance.

Cumming, 56, originally from Aberfeldy, Perthshire, kept his irritation for years before playfully embarrassing the star in front of her fans.

He told how he feared Madonna “hated” the show before her driver asked him to join her for dinner.

Cumming said: “Madonna came to see Cabaret the first time I did it on Broadway. We were all like, ‘Oh, Madonna’s in, Madonna’s in,’ and I could see her braiding her hair whilst she was watching the show.

“Afterwards we thought she might come backstage but she didn’t and I thought, ‘Oh, she hated it, how awful.’

Cabaret on Broadway in 1998. Speaking on the Talk Art podcast, he told how he reminded the 62-year-old about her rudeness in front of the audience at one of her London Palladium shows last year.

He said: “When she was doing her concerts, I got free tickets. There was a bit when she sits down next to a member of the audience and it’s usually a famous person and she has a little chat with you.

“She talked about coming to see me in Cabaret and I said, ‘I remember you were braiding your hair.’ She was like, ‘Was I? That’s incredibly rude.’ And I went, ‘Yes, it was rude.’”

Cumming’s first success came as an air steward in 1990s Scots sitcom The High Life. He went on to carve out a Hollywood career in the Spy Kids franchise, as Nightcrawler in X-Men 2 and in the James Bond movie Goldeneye.

The performer has lived in New York for more than 20 years and was awarded an OBE in 2009 in part for his activism on LGBT rights.

He is working on a new dance show about the life of Robert Burns, which will tackle the Bard’s poor treatment of women and the way his darker side has been “sanitised”.

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