The Observer Profile
Doctor Hugh
He's everybody's idea of the feather-brained Englishman, a bumbling
Wooster to Stephen Fry's ice-cool Jeeves, yet his latest success is as a
misanthropic doctor... and an American one at that
David Smith
Sunday April 24, 2005
The Observer
British failures in America are all alike, but every successful Briton
succeeds in their own way. Charlie Chaplin conquered Hollywood; the
Beatles stormed teenage hearts. More improbably, perhaps, Joan Collins
reigned as bitch queen Alexis Carrington Colby in Dynasty, while
little-known Jane Leeves became a multi-millionairess via Frasier. Now
add to that hall of fame a comic actor familiar to British TV audiences
as hapless Bertie Wooster and Blackadder's gormless Prince Regent: old
Etonian, Cambridge Blue Hugh Laurie.
So, 'by golly!', Laurie must be playing one of those goggle-eyed,
bumbling, umming and aahing aristocratic English types the Yanks delight
in? Not a bit of it. He is, instead, a misanthropic but brilliant
hospital specialist with an impeccable American accent in House, a
medical drama which is this year's surprise US hit. 'Perilously close to
perfection,' said the Washington Post of 45-year-old Laurie, previously
best known Stateside for playing the father of a talking mouse in the
hit children's film Stuart Little. USA Today opined that Dr Gregory
House, devoid of bedside manner, 'matches a great actor with a great
character'. A recent posting on the Internet Movie Database asked
innocently: 'Does Hugh have an English accent?'
House came to Britain last weekend on the subscription channel Hallmark
and transmission on a main network will surely follow. Laurie,
meanwhile, has his head down for a ferocious shooting schedule in Los
Angeles, far from his wife of 16 years, Jo Green, and their children,
Charlie, Bill and Rebecca, in London. 'It has come as a shock,' he told
New York's Newsday last week. 'My wife and I have been talking about
where we're going to live, and we quickly came to the realisation that
even if everybody came to live here, it doesn't solve the problem
because they still wouldn't see me for more than an hour or so a week.
I'm ready to drop, just bone-weary, although it's a great bunch of
people and terrific fun to do.'
Such take-it-on-the-chin-with-good-humour sentiments are pure Laurie:
it's a hard slog, chaps, but keep buggering on because, after all, this
is 'terrific fun'. Yet he is not grating in a jolly-hockey-sticks way.
Friends describe him as modest and self-deprecating. He has lived a
charmed life but is the first to admit it in the most charming possible
manner. Anyone who seeks to define Hugh Laurie will sooner or later run
into charges of sycophancy and hagiography; one interviewer, Hugh
Montgomery-Massingberd, confessed to longing to give him 'a chaste hug'.
All the evidence suggests that if you peer beneath the convincing 'one
of life's good guys' veneer you will discover ... one of life's good
guys.
'He's my best friend, I adore him,' said Stephen Fry, godfather to
Laurie's children, who firmly rejects suggestions that he (Fry) was the
lodestar in their creative partnership. 'I bow to Hugh in almost
everything. He's an infinitely wiser and cleverer man than I am, and I
mean that. People will think I'm coming up with false modestly but he is
extraordinary. I use the word "wise" advisedly; although he's
phenomenally intelligent with a fantastic brain, he's also very wise in
a way that a lot of people aren't.'
For a while, it seemed Fry and Laurie would be known as two halves of
one. They first met nearly 25 years ago in Laurie's rooms at Selwyn
College, Cambridge, where they began co- writing for the Footlights
theatre company's Christmas pantomime. They would go on to television,
starring together in A Bit of Fry And Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster and
Blackadder. But in the past decade, each has taken on a multitude of
individual TV and film projects as well as pursuing that most solo of
occupations, novelist. They remain, however, two peas in a pod and
would, Fry says, reunite for a new series of Blackadder if it was again
written by Ben Elton and Richard Curtis.
He displayed his depth as an actor in the series's First World War
finale, 'Blackadder Goes Forth', eliciting tears of both laughter and
grief as the doomed youth George eager to go over the top: 'I joined up
straightaway, sir! August the 4th, 1914. Gah, what a day that was!
Myself and the rest of the fellows, leapfrogging down to the Cambridge
recruiting office and then playing tiddlywinks in the queue. We'd
hammered Oxford's tiddlywinkers only the week before, and there we were,
off to hammer the Boche! Crashingly superb bunch of blokes. Fine,
clean-limbed - even their acne had a strange nobility about it.' As the
sardonic Blackadder can guess, the fellows, of course, are now all dead.
Clouds on Laurie's sunny horizon are rare but not unknown. In 1996, he
told interviewer Lynn Barber that one day he was shocked to find himself
stock car racing and not feeling excited or terrified but merely bored.
'I thought, I'm not seizing the moment, somehow. I'm not carpe-ing the
diem ... so I went to my GP and said, "I think maybe I'm depressed."' He
found solace in therapy.
There was also a difficult relationship with his mother, who died from
motor neurone disease 15 years ago. He told GQ magazine: 'She had
moments of not liking me - quite protracted moments. When I say moments,
I use the word broadly, to cover months.' Later, he told Barber it was
more complicated than that but: 'Oh God, you see, I've never spoken to
my brother and sisters about this, and I worry about them reading it.
I'd better draw a veil.'
But Laurie, the youngest of two sisters and two brothers, was close to
his father, a rowing gold medallist at the 1948 Olympics and GP. Both
parents were Scottish and attended a Presbyterian church; Laurie has
identified his own 'ridiculous Presbyterian streak'. He wears his kilt
with pride but was born and raised in Oxford, educated at Eton (he was a
house captain) and considered a career in the army or, as Fry recalls:
'Hugh always used to say he wanted to go in the Hong Kong police force.
I think he had read somewhere that there was corruption there and it
needed good, clean Englishmen - or Scotsmen in his case - to go and sort
it out and be a sort of Serpico figure. I think he rather liked that
idea
- half seriously.'
Luarie was to achieve only a third in anthropology and archaeology at
Cambridge but, to this day, is apparently more riled by losing the 1980
Boat Race to Oxford by a measly five feet. Following in his father's oar
strokes was a serious option for the athletic 6ft 2in student, but a
bout of glandular fever interrupted training, and so Laurie gravitated
to Footlights. Kenneth Branagh was a friend; Emma Thompson was a
girlfriend who introduced him to Fry. With Tony Slattery, they went to
the Edinburgh Festival and won the first Perrier Award, toured Australia
for three months and, as Thompson puts it: 'By the time we came back,
they [Fry and Laurie] were married.' Laurie became Footlights president
and a career path opened effortlessly before him, perhaps too
effortlessly.
'I've really drifted for so much of my life I've made very, very few
decisions,' he once said. 'I sort of just tumbled along and then, when I
was in my last year at Cambridge, a man pulled up in a Bentley with a
long cigar and said, "I'm an agent, do you want to do this acting thing
for a living?" Which is, like, ridiculous really - that I wasn't tested.
I've never had to pay any great price for what I do, and I sometimes
feel a bit guilty about that.'
Laurie, also a gifted guitarist and keyboard player who appears with the
band Poor White Trash, has been blessed and he knows it. Fry said: 'I
think all of us who have had obvious advantages like private education
and Cambridge and all that sort of thing are bound to feel, if not
guilty, then at least we owe the world something. I think that's a
natural and healthy thing.'
And Fry believes his friend's ad-hoc start in the business has been
liberating. 'I think one of the advantages of not being trained, of
being educated, is that you are not an anything, you're not a noun. I'm
not a comic actor, he's not a comic actor, we just do things, whatever
comes up, whatever appeals. For him, House is something that greatly
appealed
'When one looks at House next to Jeeves and Wooster, one realises his
range: they couldn't be more opposite. Wooster is the sunniest and most
pleasant natured, open, daft figure. One of Hugh's great achievements as
Gregory House is that you really believe how smart this character is;
he's a son of a bitch and all the other things, but he carries his
intelligence like a kind of charisma.'
Laurie got the part of the arrogant, obnoxious, patient-loathing genius
Dr House after the show's executive producer, Bryan Singer, who had no
idea he was British, was 'floored' by the actor's audition. 'I was very
lucky to sneak under the wire,' said Laurie, modest again. 'It actually
worked to my advantage that he had never heard of me.'
Screened by the Fox network, House made a slow start but now attracts 18
million viewers, putting it in the top 10 American programmes. A second
series has been commissioned, reportedly forcing Laurie to pull out of
the big budget movie Superman Returns, in which he was to play Clark
Kent's editor. Still, House could earn him an estimated £240,000 an
episode.
With such big bucks, he can indulge his passion for shiny new
motorbikes. If he has time. For he now has a new sporting hobby, Fry
reveals: 'He has taken up in a light way, at the weekends and on his
very, very precious days off in Los Angeles, a bit of boxing.' Fry used
to beat Laurie at chess and snooker, while Laurie won their games of
backgammon and billiards. Twelve rounds in the ring to decide the
winner? Fry chuckles. 'I wouldn't have a chance; he's better at
everything than I am.' And one feels sure Laurie would say the same
about Fry.
Hugh Laurie
DoB: 11 June 1959
Education: Dragon School, Oxford; Eton College; Selwyn College,
Cambridge
Family: Married, in 1989, to Jo Green (two sons and one daughter)
TV: Blackadder (three series), Fry and Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, House
and more
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