Hugh Laurie

James Hugh Calum Laurie (; born 11 June 1959) is an English actor, comedian, and musician. Laurie first gained professional recognition as a member of the English comedy double act Fry and Laurie with Stephen Fry. Fry and Laurie acted together in several projects during the 1980s and 1990s, including the BBC sketch comedy series A Bit of Fry & Laurie and the P. G. Wodehouse adaptation Jeeves and Wooster. From 1986 to 1989, Laurie appeared in three series of the period comedy Blackadder.

From 2004 to 2012, Laurie starred as Dr. Gregory House on the Fox medical drama series House. He received two Golden Globe Awards and many other accolades for his work on House. He was listed in the 2011 Guinness World Records as the most-watched leading man on television and was one of the highest-paid actors in a television drama at the time. After House, Laurie won a Golden Globe for his starring role as arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper, the main antagonist in the TV series The Night Manager (2016–present). He received his 10th Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of Senator Tom James in the HBO sitcom Veep (2015–2019).

Laurie released the blues albums Let Them Talk (2011) and Didn't It Rain (2013), both to favourable reviews. Laurie also wrote the novel The Gun Seller (1996). He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2007 New Year Honours and CBE in the 2018 New Year Honours, both for services to drama.

Early life and education

Laurie was born on 11 June 1959, in the Blackbird Leys area of Oxford, England. He is the youngest of four children of Patricia (née Laidlaw) and William George Ranald Mundell "Ran" Laurie, who was a physician and winner of an Olympic gold medal in the coxless pairs (rowing) at the 1948 London Games. He has an older brother, Charles Alexander Lyon Mundell Laurie, and two older sisters, Susan and Janet. Laurie had a strained relationship with his mother, whom he described as "Presbyterian by character, by mood". He later said, "I was frustration to her. She didn't like me."

Laurie's parents, who were both of Scottish descent, attended St Columba's Presbyterian Church (now United Reformed Church) in Oxford. He notes that "belief in God didn't play a large role" in his home, but "a certain attitude to life and the living of it did". He followed this by stating, "Pleasure was something that was treated with great suspicion, pleasure was something that... I was going to say it had to be earned, but even the earning of it didn't really work. It was something to this day, I mean, I carry that with me. I find pleasure a difficult thing; I don't know what you do with it, I don't know where to put it." He later stated, "I don't believe in God, but I have this idea that if there were a God, or destiny of some kind looking down on us, that if he saw you taking anything for granted, he'd take it away.

Laurie was brought up in Oxford and attended the Dragon School from seven to 13, later stating, "I was, in truth, a horrible child. Not much given to things of a 'bookey' nature, I spent a large part of my youth smoking Number Six and cheating in French vocabulary tests." He went on to Eton College, which he described as "the most private of private schools".

Laurie enrolled at Selwyn College, Cambridge, in 1978, which he says he attended "as a result of family tradition" since his father went there. Like his father, Laurie rowed at school and university. He has noted that his father was a successful rower at Cambridge and that he was "trying to follow in [his] father's footsteps". In 1977, he was a member of the junior coxed pair that won the British national title before representing Britain's Youth Team at the 1977 Junior World Rowing Championships. In 1980, Laurie and his rowing partner, J.S. Palmer, were runners-up in the Silver Goblets coxless pairs for Eton Vikings rowing club. He also achieved a Blue while taking part in the 1980 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. Cambridge lost that year by five feet. During this time, Laurie was training for up to eight hours a day and was on course to become an Olympic-standard rower. He is a member of the Leander Club, one of the oldest rowing clubs in the world, and was a member of the Hermes Club and Hawks' Club. Laurie studied archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, specialising in social anthropology. He graduated with third-class honours in 1981.

Career

Comedy and acting

Forced to abandon rowing during a bout of glandular fever, Laurie joined the Cambridge Footlights, a university dramatic club that has produced many well-known actors and comedians, including members of the popular British surreal comedy group, Monty Python. There he met Emma Thompson, with whom he had a romantic relationship; the two remain good friends. She introduced him to his future comedy partner, Stephen Fry. Laurie, Fry, and Thompson later parodied themselves in the sitcom The Young Ones. In the episode "Bambi", they and the series' co-writer Ben Elton appear on University Challenge as representatives of "Footlights College, Oxbridge".

In 1980–81, his final year at university, besides rowing, Laurie was president of the Footlights, with Thompson as vice-president. They took their annual revue, The Cellar Tapes, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and won the first Perrier Comedy Award, which was presented to them by Rowan Atkinson. The revue was written principally by Laurie and Fry, and the cast also included Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer, and Penny Dwyer. 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 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 show for Granada Television, Alfresco, which ran for two series.

Fry and Laurie worked together on various projects throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Among them was the sitcom Blackadder, written by Ben Elton and Richard Curtis and starring Rowan Atkinson. Laurie first appeared in the last two episodes of the second series, Blackadder II, debuting as Blackadder's drunken friend Simon Partridge in the episode "Beer", and then as the villainous Prince Ludwig the Indestructible in the episode "Chains". Laurie joined the main cast for the third series, Blackadder the Third, where he played Prince George, followed by the fourth and final series, Blackadder Goes Forth, where he was promoted to Lieutenant George. Other collaborations with Fry included their BBC sketch comedy series A Bit of Fry & Laurie, as well as Jeeves and Wooster, a television adaptation of P. G. Wodehouse's stories, in which Laurie played Jeeves's employer, the amiable twit Bertie Wooster. He and Fry also participated in charity stage events, such as Hysteria! 1, 2 & 3, Amnesty International's The Secret Policeman's Third Ball, the Comic Relief TV shows, and the variety show Fry and Laurie Host a Christmas Night with the Stars. They collaborated again on the film Peter's Friends (1992) and came together for a retrospective show in 2010 titled Fry and Laurie Reunited.

Laurie starred in the Thames Television film Letters from a Bomber Pilot (1985), directed by David Hodgson. This was a serious acting role, the film being dramatised from the letters home of Pilot Officer J.R.A. "Bob" Hodgson, a pilot in RAF Bomber Command, who was killed in action in 1943.

Laurie appeared in the music videos for the 1986 single "Experiment IV" by Kate Bush, and the 1992 Annie Lennox single "Walking on Broken Glass" in British Regency period costume alongside John Malkovich. Laurie appeared in the Spice Girls' film Spice World (1997) and had a brief guest-starring role on Friends in "The One with Ross's Wedding" (1998).

Laurie's later film appearances include Sense and Sensibility (1995), adapted by and starring Emma Thompson; the Disney live-action film 101 Dalmatians (1996), where he played Jasper, one of the bumbling criminals hired to kidnap the puppies; Elton's adaptation of his novel Inconceivable, Maybe Baby (2000); Girl from Rio; the 2004 adaptation of The Flight of the Phoenix, and Stuart Little.

Since 2002, Laurie has appeared 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 (in one episode of which Stephen Fry appears). In 2001, he voiced the character of a bar patron in the Family Guy episode "One If by Clam, Two If by Sea". Laurie voiced the character of Mr. Wolf in the cartoon Preston Pig. He was a panellist on the first episode of QI, alongside Fry as host. In 2004, Laurie guest-starred on The Lenny Henry Show.