[3] Growing up, Cunningham was a footballer, signing and playing for West Bromwich Albion until suffering an injury which derailed his career.

To fund his place on one of the first degree courses in recording arts, Cunningham signed up for a grant programme run by the PFA (Professional Footballers Association).

[4] In 2004, Following his early experiences in music and his subsequent immersion into the London club scene, Actress founded the label Werk Discs (spelt Werkdiscs from 2012).

During this early period of Cunningham's career, he remixed various productions, wrote for Soma Records and released singles and EPs through Prime Numbers and Nonplus.

The album was notable for displaying a shift in the musical direction for Actress, and was described as almost feeling "like another artist entirely" by Drowned in Sound, who also described it as "the most fully realised, ambitious and rewarding project that Cunningham has yet put to record".

as sitting "at the point of convergence for all of electronic music's most cutting-edge sounds, incorporating pieces of them all and feeling out the unexpected ways they synchronize.

[citation needed] In October 2017, Actress was invited by the British Arts Council to perform a multimedia interpretation of Steve Reich's Different Trains to mark the 70th anniversary of Indian independence.

[19] In 2018, the recordings of this performance were compiled and released as an album titled LAGEOS, described by The Guardian as formulating "a new sonic palette that is in equal measures intriguing and unsettling.

[citation needed] In March 2012, shortly before the release of R.I.P., Cunningham performed alongside Koreless and Lapalux as part of a Tate Modern exhibition dedicated to the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

[33] Actress participated in Alternative Perceptions in September 2012 at Tate Modern, a collaboration with Matthew Herbert and several other artists such as Moiré, Purple Ferdinand, Kate Tempest and Knit the City.

Titled A Shared Cultural Memory, the piece was billed as "audio-visual experiences in direct response to the architecture and atmosphere of the Church.

[36] "The three-part composition shows our civilization as an imploded space without recognizable gravity, of which only floating machine fragments and rotting objects remain as quotations without a reference system.