A Bit of Hugh and Worry, by James Mottram
From Scotland on Sunday
May 7, 2000, Sunday
Finding the key to Hugh Laurie is a difficult task. Comedian, actor,
novelist, part-time musician, he is as talented as his chum and working
partner Stephen Fry, a man whose vast intellect has often inadvertently
overshadowed Laurie's own achievements in their collaboration.
Not that he would mind. The first thing you notice about Laurie, aside
from his frame (six foot two, slim build) and features, which, despite
his Scottish parents, are quintessentially English, is his modesty.
Self-effacing and almost apologetic over his talent, he arrives in
casual attire to our London hotel rendezvous with all the qualities one
might wistfully imagine a former Eton and Cambridge student to have:
generosity, good manners, a downright good egg.
Indeed, Laurie is in danger of lapsing into a caricature of the slightly
bewildered, old-fashioned English gentleman.
Two much-loved characters in Blackadder, three series of A Bit Of Fry
And Laurie, and four of Jeeves And Wooster have made him part of the
British comedy establishment over the last 20 years, since he and fellow
Cambridge graduate Fry teamed up with Young Ones co-creator Ben Elton
for Granada's Alfresco sketch show in 1981. Yet, when I suggest his and
Fry's own material was groundbreaking - indebted to Pete and Dud and
Monty Python admittedly, but a precursor for the work of, say, Steve
Coogan in its use of language - he seems shocked and calls me "a poor
deluded fool".
It is a humility that is most becoming, and is clearly more than just a
tool for ingratiating himself with interviewers. Comedy, he says, is a
way of deflecting things, or avoiding emotion. It is also a way of
steering journalists away from the inner person; a man, it would seem,
affected, like us all, with insecurities and self-doubt, yet struggling
with a competitive edge in a country that can frown upon success. He
tells me he is a hallucinator, a dreamer who talks to himself and will
probably go away from the interview and imagine all the witty tales he
could have regaled me with. He sees a psychotherapist regularly and
remains, despite his success, prone to black moods and depression. He
said once: "I have clung to unhappiness because it was a known familiar
state. When I was happier, it was because I knew I was on my way back to
misery."
"It used to be true," he says of his lack of ego. "It's not that I got
cockier, but I've got more relaxed. I used to worry more. Although I
appeared shyer, I used to be more arrogant. I was probably more scared
of f**king up than Stephen was. He's game, he's up for it, but I'd be
going, 'No, how would that be? What if I don't get it right?' I'd always
be thinking what a disaster it would be if I got it wrong. I think it's
a conceit to fear failure that much. If you're a normal, well-adjusted
person, you should say what's the big deal?"
It was turning professional that did it. Laurie studied archaeology and
anthropology at Selwyn College (he got a third), where he teamed up with
Fry, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery, among others, as part of that
famous comic breeding ground the Cambridge Footlights revue. Those were
his young and carefree days, he says, when it was all done for the
applause, when he used to imagine his audiences - collectively - as
female.
"When I started doing it for a living, the audience became male.
It became a big bloke with his arms crossed, going 'All right then, make
me laugh'. The audience became an enemy that had to be competed with. It
was horrible. I went through a few years of thinking, 'I don't enjoy
this'. Then it went away again and the audience became female."
An affinity with women is easy to see. Ben Elton, who has just made his
directorial debut with the romantic comedy Maybe Baby (based on his own
semi -autobiographical novel Inconceivable) with Laurie playing the
lead, agrees: "I've always known that girls love Hugh.
"He'd hate this. I've known him 20 years, and girls find him attractive.
He's done all these 'Gawd help us' parts because he's a brilliant
comedian, and he's been cast in all these heavily comic roles. But I've
known the great secret - which friends all know - that Hugh is a very
attractive, sexy but also thoughtful man."
He adds that there was much of Laurie's personality in the character of
Maybe Baby's Sam, a frustrated scriptwriter working for the BBC who also
struggles to deal with the infertility problems he and his wife are
suffering. Laurie, elusive as ever, deflects this notion, however, with
a gag.
"Ben and I have known each other a long time and we probably are a weird
mixture," he says. "In our lives, we both probably had attitudes and
things that have rubbed off on each other... taste in socks. I don't
mean taste as in eating socks. Neither of us eats socks. But then we
have that in common: neither of us eat socks."
Elton describes his friend as a still water that runs very deep. "He's
not the easiest man to talk to because there's an intensity to his
personality which I knew the camera would capture - and love. He's our
Tom Hanks. Not the best-looking guy, but the most interesting.
"The guy with the most honesty and the most depth."
Laurie will go as far as saying that his physical self is present in
Sam, and that he longed for the comfort zone of the character role. "I
wish there were times when I'd been doing more of a turn, in a way,
where I'd had a funny accent or a stupid walk to hide behind," he says.
While Fry has taken to making such cameo appearances in mediocre British
films such as What's Happened To Harold Smith? and the forthcoming Best
And Relative Values, Laurie is unwittingly being packaged as a leading
man.
"I know, I know," he says, "it is extremely scary. But let's be honest.
Nothing actors do is frightening. You only have to go and say words in
front of a camera. It's not that big a deal. A lot of people are
terrified of it. Unfortunately I'm one of them. In which case, I've
rather chosen the wrong profession."
Too true. Maybe Baby has designs on being this year's Notting Hill,
while the live-action, computer-animated children's feature Stuart
Little, in which Laurie, plus Geena Davis playing the wife, adopt the
eponymous mouse, has already taken over 100 million in the United
States. Both will raise his profile, for this is certainly his year.
"Believe me, I'm a pair of shoes in it," he says of Stuart Little.
"An important pair of shoes, perhaps. You glimpse my ankles now and
again. I'm pretty proud of my ankle work in that. I went through a
careful, ankle -toning programme."
After sporadic film appearances, Hollywood has finally realised what it
has in Laurie. Supporting roles in Kenneth Branagh's Peter's Friends, as
well as The Borrowers and the live-action remake of 101 Dalmatians,
paved the way. His ascent up the Hollywood ladder was mainly due to his
acerbic turn as the disgruntled husband Mr Palmer, in Ang Lee's 1996
adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.
Even there, the Cambridge connection served him well: ex-girlfriend Emma
Thompson wrote the screenplay and invited Laurie to take the part.
The thought, as Elton hinted, that Laurie might be a sex symbol in the
making, disturbs him. He stops to light a cigarette before brushing away
the suggestion. "I don't accept your premise. The very idea is
preposterous."
He has no conception that his recent success has, or will, change his
life. He is 41 this year, married now for 11 years to Jo, with three
children. He lives in north London and likes motorcycles (he's owned at
least 10 since his father gave him a moped when he was 18).
What he would like to do is sit down, at home, and write songs and
novels. After his first novel, The Gun Seller, a comic dip into the
world of Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean, he is beavering away at a
follow-up that he is too superstitious to discuss.
"Everyone said the second one is the hardest, so I thought about
skipping the second and going straight to the third. But it hasn't
worked. Apparently, you're not allowed to do that. It is proving to be
difficult. Partly because I wrote the first without anyone knowing I was
doing it, so I could sneak away and do it and I didn't feel I had to
answer to anyone. Even when I'd finished it, I had a pretty firm idea
that I wanted to publish it under another name. I sent it to a publisher
under another name. I can understand it: how repulsive it must look to
see all those comedians rushing into print. Although, to be honest, you
don't rush anywhere with a novel. It's a very painful business. Anyone
who writes 200 printed pages has put in some hours. It's not a cheap and
easy thing to do."
Sam's frustrations certainly live on in Laurie. "Given that men cannot
create life, they tend to create through work," he says. "They can't
bring people into existence, but they bring things. Sam's child is his
screenplay, to fulfil this longing to produce. That is tussling with
Lucy's idea to create a life."
As if to differentiate himself from his peers (Elton, Fry, Adrian
Edmondson) who have made the literary leap, Laurie harbours on-going
musical ambitions. A talented piano and guitar player, he tells me,
almost shamefacedly, that he is trying to write an album of tender love
songs, whimsically called Music To Listen To Music By.
"That requires a great deal of nerve. Playing a romantic lead takes a
bit of nerve, and you feel very exposed doing that, but to actually
write and performa I don't think about anything else. It is my absolute
fantasy, to be a professional musician. Probably, my autumnal career
will be playing the piano in a cocktail bar somewhere, Lisbon probably.
Never been there, but it just strikes me as a good place."
Born in Oxford, the youngest by six years of four children, his father
was a long-standing GP of the area, his mother a housewife and sometime
writer. Both were keen church-going Presbyterians. Though not possessed
of any great faith himself, Laurie has in the past said that he has a
"ridiculous Presbyterian streak that demands I make things difficult and
unpleasant and I can't believe anything is really worth doing unless I
manage to turn it into a nightmare."
His father had been an outstanding oarsman at Cambridge, winning three
Boat Races and a gold medal at the 1948 London Olympics. It was a mantle
Laurie took up seriously, a gentleman's sport that could satisfy his
urge to win. In his first year at Cambridge, Laurie fell ill with
glandular fever and had to quit rowing. When he recovered, he made the
crew for the 1980 race, one of the most exciting in years, as Cambridge
lost to Oxford by less than 10 feet, the closest finish this century.
No-one makes the Boat Race without being both tremendously determined
and dedicated; a clue to the real Laurie behind the Woosterish
affability.
By this point, the student who had once wanted to join the Hong Kong
police or the army, had become president of the Footlights team. He was
introduced to Fry by Thompson, during an Edinburgh Fringe run of Fry's
play Latin!
He admits the pair have, at least professionally, drifted apart since
the third (and weakest) series of A Bit Of Fry And Laurie. However, he
does not rule out the possibility of future reunions.
"It probably wouldn't be sketches, but I hope we would find something to
do. We just make each other laugh. I feel like we are in the middle of a
phone conversation.
Neither of us has hung up, we've just put the phone down on the table
and we'll pick it up in a minute and carry on."
Their best material, he says, came from when they were both chipping in
comments furiously as the deadline approached. While their brand of
humour is neither as anarchic or polemical as Elton's, it was as
critical, in its own way, of the increasing mediocrity and conservatism
of people and institutions in a once-great nation. Laurie would be too
polite to point out where their creations originated, but he has no
qualms about discussing his erstwhile employer, the BBC.
"They are victims of the whole management culture that envelops this
country. In those days, they had the confidence to leave people alone.
They were grown -ups. Now, it seems possibly they are more nervous about
coming unstuck and the ratings. Everybody's scared."
If there is a real Hugh Laurie to be found, maybe this is it. Humble and
genial on the surface, but razor sharp and ready to roar beneath.
He might even do something about it one day. Maybe. * Maybe Baby opens
June
2; Stuart Little opens July 21
--Copyright 2000 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.
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