Early Life
McCormack was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the son of Doris, a homemaker, and Keith McCormack, an oil company financial analyst. He is the oldest of three siblings. McCormack has Cherokee and Scottish ancestry. McCormack admits while he was growing up, he was shy and did not play sports. McCormack attended Stephen Leacock Collegiate Institute High School in Scarborough, Ontario. There, he enrolled in theatre and performed in high school productions of Godspell and Pippin, and decided to pursue a career in acting. McCormack recalls after performing in Godspell, his feelings towards becoming an actor solidified. "...I remember after the first performance of that ... I knew where to fit in. That was the beginning of my life as an actor. It changed me in that the concept of any other options disappeared. From that moment there was no question. I knew exactly what I was going to do. I'm lucky that way." He admits that he never felt cool growing up. "I was a bit of an outsider, but I discovered theatre very early on, which got me through." He then transferred to Sir John A. Macdonald Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, where he went to school with David Furnish. He graduated in 1982.
McCormack enrolled at Ryerson University School of Theatre in Toronto to further improve his acting. He left Ryerson in 1985, several months before graduating, in order to accept a position with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, where he spent five seasons performing. "It was all I wanted, to be a classical actor for the rest of my life, but during the last couple of years I was there, I started to realise that it wasn't for me. Perhaps I didn't have to give my Hamlet before I died, that the world might be an OK place without my Hamlet, in fact." McCormack appeared in the productions A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry V, Murder in the Cathedral and Three Sisters. McCormack later performed with the Manitoba Theatre Centre in a production of Burn This as well as with Toronto's Royal Alexandra Theatre in Biloxi Blues.
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