Hugh Laurie
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James Hugh Calum Laurie (born June 11, 1959) is an English actor, comedian and writer. He is, perhaps, best known for his television comedy work with Stephen Fry (including A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster). However, it is his current role, starring as Dr. Gregory House in the television show House, that has made him well-known to American audiences. In 2006, Laurie won the Golden Globe for for his work in the series.
Education
Laurie was born and raised in Oxford, where he attended the Dragon School, a prestigious fee-paying preparatory school. He later went on to Eton and then to Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he achieved a Third-Class Honours degree in Anthropology & Archaeology. His father had won an Olympic gold medal in rowing at the 1948 Games, and Laurie himself was a rower at school and university, taking part in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race of 1980. Cambridge lost that year by five feet.Forced to abandon rowing during a bout of glandular fever (mononucleosis), he joined the famous Cambridge Footlights, which has been the starting point for many successful British comedians. There he met Emma Thompson, whom he dated and remains good friends with, and who introduced him to his future comedy partner, Stephen Fry. Laurie, Fry and Thompson later parodied themselves as the University Challenge representatives of "Footlights College, Oxbridge" in "Bambi", an episode of The Young Ones, with the series' co-writer Ben Elton completing their team. In 1980–81, his final year at university, Laurie managed to find time alongside his rowing to be president of the Footlights, with Thompson as vice-president. They took their annual revue, The Cellar Tapes (written principally by Laurie and Fry, cast also including Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer and Penny Dwyer), to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and won the first Perrier Award for comedy.
Career
The Perrier Award led to a West End transfer for The Cellar Tapes and a television version of the revue, broadcast in May 1982. It also resulted in Laurie, Fry and Thompson being selected along with Ben Elton, Robbie Coltrane and Siobhan Redmond to write and appear in a new sketch comedy TV show for Granada, Alfresco, which ran for two series.Laurie and Fry went on to work together on various projects throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Among them were the Blackadder series, written by Ben Elton and Richard Curtis and starring Rowan Atkinson, with Laurie in various roles, but most notably Prince George and Lieutenant George; their BBC sketch comedy series, A Bit of Fry and Laurie; and Jeeves and Wooster. The latter was an adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse's stories, where Laurie played Jeeves' employer, the amiable twit Bertie Wooster. It was a role for which Laurie was considered particularly well suited, displaying his talent as a pianist and singer, alongside his celebrated 'posh' voice. He and Fry also worked together at various charity stage events, such as Hysteria! 1, 2 & 3 and Amnesty International's The Secret Policeman's Third Ball, Comic Relief TV shows and the variety show Fry and Laurie Host a Christmas Night with the Stars. In addition, they collaborated on the film Peter's Friends.
Laurie's other film appearances include Sense and Sensibility (1995), written by and starring Emma Thompson; the Disney live-action movie 101 Dalmatians (1996), where he played Jasper, one of the bumbling criminals hired to kidnap the puppies; Ben Elton's adaptation of his novel Inconceivable, Maybe Baby (2000); Girl From Rio; the 2004 remake of Flight of the Phoenix; and the two Stuart Little films in which he first surprised audiences with an American accent.
In 1996 Laurie's first novel, The Gun Seller, a spoof of the thriller genre, was published and became a best seller. He has since been working on the screenplay for a movie version and on a second novel.
In 1998, Laurie had a brief guest-starring role on Friends in the episode "The One With Ross's Wedding, Part Two" as a man seated next to Rachel on a flight to London. With the popularity of House, his short scenes in the episode have become favourites of fans of both series, largely due to his comically disdainful use of the name 'Pheebs'.
Since 2002, Laurie began appearing in a range of British television dramas, guest-starring that year in two episodes of the first season of the spy thriller series Spooks on BBC One. In 2003, he starred in and also directed ITV's comedy-drama series Fortysomething. He also voiced a character in the Family Guy episode "One If By Clam, Two If By Sea", as well as the character of Mr Wolf in the cartoon Preston Pig.
Although Laurie has been a household name in Britain since the 1980s, he only really came to the attention of the American public in 2004, when he first starred as the cantankerous physician Dr Gregory House in the popular FOX medical drama, House. As the story goes, Laurie filmed the audition tape for the show in the bathroom of the hotel in Namibia where he was filming Flight of the Phoenix, the only place he could get enough light. His American accent was so convincing that the director, Bryan Singer, pointed to him as an example of just the kind of compelling American actor he'd been looking for.
In July 2005, Laurie was nominated for an Emmy Award for his role in House. Although he did not win, he did receive a Golden Globe in 2006 for his work on the same series. Laurie has also been awarded a large increase in salary, from what was rumoured to be a mid-range five-figure sum to $300,000 per episode. His House contract was also extended for an additional year, allowing for at least a fourth season to be produced. [CNN.com: 'House' star gets huge raise]
Personal life
Hugh Laurie married Jo Green in June 1989. They live in north London with their daughter, Rebecca, and two sons, Bill and Charlie.He stated on BBC Radio 2 in an interview with Steve Wright in January 2006 that he is currently living in an apartment in West Hollywood while he is in the United States, working on House.
Quotes
- "I grew up with an impatience with the anti-scientific. So I'm a bit miffed with our current love affair with all things Eastern. If I sneeze on the set, 40 people hand me echinacea. But I'd no sooner take that than eat a pencil. Maybe that's why I took up boxing. It's my response to men in white pyjamas feeling each other's chi." [link]
- Emma Thompson on Laurie: "He is very very loveable. He is one of those rare people who manages to be lugubriously sexy, like a well-hung eel." [link]
- On his hatred of watching his own performances: "Inside your head, your voice is interesting; it goes up and down and is full of light and shade and emotion. When you hear it, though, it's? uh? it's horrible." [link]
- Joely Richardson, co-star of Maybe Baby: "Hugh has this heartbreaking quality. When his face is still, the pathos is extraordinary. There are two sides to him. There's the Hugh who dances around and cracks jokes, tangos all over the place. And there's the other side: tortured, dark." [link]
- "I've never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. I'm wary of happiness. It is a snare and a delusion. It's jolly nice sometimes, like steak and chips, but is it a goal?" [link]
- Stephen Fry on meeting Laurie: "The best thing that could have happened to me, both in career terms and emotionally. He is absolutely my best friend. People sometimes call me a Renaissance man, but I'm not and Hugh is. He's a natural athlete. He's a gifted musician. He is clever, perceptive, has natural charisma. Sometimes it is thought that I'm the loud mouth and the dominant one, but we have been an equal partnership. And we have not been jealous of each other — I'm genuinely thrilled when good things happen for him. And I'm particularly thrilled by the way his acting career is going." [link]
- On his mother Patricia: "I don't know if she was clinically depressed, but she certainly had moods. When she was in a good mood, she was such a joy. But she used to get very angry with me. I think she found me a disappointment in many ways." [link]
- On working with Stephen Fry again: "I think we both would like to do that, we're just not very good at planning, we've never planned anything. We have no Sasco year planner on an office wall anywhere, that's probably our mistake. If we'd just invested that, I think a very reasonable 85, 90p, something like that, and a felt tip pen, we could've got it all sorted out, but we never did."
- On keeping up the American accent on House: "It's the hardest single thing in my day; I find it incredibly difficult. You see, half of my brain — and it's not a big brain to start off with, but anyway — half of it is devoted to playing the character, the other half is listening to myself and censoring myself and adjusting myself and, er, the third half — yeah, now you see the problem — the third half is having to tell the second half to "Shut up!" because I end up looking like I'm just on Valium all the time, because I'm having to think so hard about how an American would say it."
- On the birth of his second son during filming for Jeeves and Wooster: "We were halfway through a scene and the phone call came from the hospital — I didn't even know she was pregnant, it was such a shock — and I had to, we'd done all my bit, with the camera pointing my way, so I ran off to the hospital in my costume, which was very exciting, well, vaguely exciting, and poor old Stephen was left to do the rest of the scene just to thin air. Which was probably preferable, I dunno." Stephen: "Yes, thin air's a better actor." Hugh: "Yeah, not so wooden." #redirect
- Christopher Buckley, New York Times Book Review, on Laurie's book The Gun Seller: "As a writer, Mr. Laurie is smart, charming, warm, cool (if need be) and high-spirited [...] This is a genuinely witty and sophisticated entertainment."
Trivia
- During a guest appearance on The Tonight Show on 16 November 2005, Laurie revealed that he once tried hydrocodone (Vicodin) in order to get into character for his role as Dr House.
- Laurie's nose is slightly out of joint because of the many fights he was in as a boy.
- Laurie was badly burned by a petrol bomb that he made at the age of ten.
- In 1996, he concluded he was clinically depressed, a diagnosis that was later confirmed in analysis and treated successfully. Laurie first recognised the extent of his depression when he realised the car race he was in neither excited nor scared him. [link]
- His favourite motorcycle is the Triumph Bonneville.
- During the first season of filming for House, Hugh Laurie lived at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood.
- Laurie was cast as The Daily Planet editor, Perry White, in the film Superman Returns by director Bryan Singer, but was unable to play the role due to his prior commitment to the second season of House. Incidentally, House is backed by Bryan Singer's production company, Bad Hat Harry Productions.
- Laurie appeared in the music video for the 1992 single "Walking on Broken Glass" by Annie Lennox, in full Regency-period costume as in Blackadder the Third (and opposite John Malkovich, similarly reprising Dangerous Liaisons). He also appears as a scientist in the video for Experiment IV by Kate Bush
- Laurie admires the writings of P.G. Wodehouse: he explained in a 27 May 1999 article in The Daily Telegraph how reading Wodehouse novels had saved his life. [link]
- He is a skilled musician. He can play the piano, guitar and harmonica. He has displayed his skills in episodes of several series, most notably A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster and House.
- He is known to be huge fan of Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen.
Selected filmography
- House (2004–present) - Dr Gregory House
- Flight of the Phoenix (2004) - Ian
- Stuart Little 2 (2002) - Mr Frederick Little
- Chica de Río (2001) - Raymond
- Maybe Baby (2000) - Sam Bell
- Stuart Little (1999) - Mr Frederick Little
- (1999) - Viscount George Bufton-Tufton/Georgius
- The Man in the Iron Mask (1998) - Pierre, The King's Advisor
- 101 Dalmatians (1996) - Jasper
- Sense and Sensibility (1995) - Mr Palmer
- Peter's Friends (1992) - Roger Charleston
- Jeeves and Wooster (1990-1993) - Bertie Wooster
- Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) - Lt the Honourable George Colhurst St Barleigh
- A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1989-1995) - writer/various characters
- Blackadder the Third (1987) - George, Prince of Wales, Prince Regent
- Blackadder II (1985) - Simon Partridge (also known as Mr Ostrich & Farters Parters), Prince Ludwig the Indestructible
References
See also
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