Hugh Laurie

Hugh Laurie is an acclaimed British comedian, actor, musician, director and author who rose to fame in the United States with his role as the cranky, irascible Dr. Gregory House on the television drama House. Previously, he had spent most of his acting career doing mostly comedy and children’s movies.

In the Beginning

James Hugh Calum Laurie was born in Oxford, England on June 11, 1959, to Ran Laurie, a medical doctor, and Patricia Laurie, a writer who was occasionally published in The London Times. Hugh’s father was also an Olympic gold medalist, winning a gold medal in the 1948 games in rowing. The youngest of four children with two older sisters and one brother, Hugh was brought up in the Scottish Presbyterian Church but says faith and God were not a huge factor in his family life. Laurie is a proclaimed atheist that says the ramifications of pleasure and the earning or deserving of pleasure along with the strong expectations of his mother caused him to not really identify with his mother to a great degree. He even reports that he felt like his mother didn’t particularly like him very much. Conversely, he enjoyed a very close relationship with his father who he says is one of the sweetest people he has ever met. Hugh Laurie attended some of the best schools in England including Eaton and Selwyn College at Cambridge, but he was not a very enthusiastic student, focusing mostly on athletics. He was a rower just like his father and won several important competitions before the acting bug got him during a bout with Mono his freshman year of college. He couldn’t row, so he joined the dramatic club at Cambridge called the Footlights. It was at Footlights that he became involved with Emma Thompson, a British actress, and Stephen Fry, who would go on to be Laurie’s comedic partner for much of his career. At the beginning of his career Laurie, Thompson and Frye submitted The Cellar Tapes to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and won the Perrier Comedy Award.

Most Known For

While Hugh Laurie is most known for playing Dr. Gregory House to most Americans, he enjoyed a very robust career in television and film prior to taking on the role in House in 2004. With his creative partner, Stephen Fry, he was involved in several British comedy shows including A Bit with Fry and Laurie which ran for eight years and Jeeves and Wooster where he played a rich, but an inept character that was always requiring the assistant of his butler, Jeeves, to get out of trouble. Both of these programs, among many others, catapulted Laurie to fame in the United Kingdom well before Americans go a good glimpse of him as Jasper, one of the inept villains, in the live-action version of 101 Dalmatians in 1996.

Where Is He Now?

Where are they now? Hugh Laurie has been working on an album release for Didn’t it Rain?, and most recently starred in the Disney movie, Tomorrowland with George Clooney and Tim McGraw.