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James Hugh Calum Laurie, OBE (born June 11, 1959) is an English actor, comedian, writer and musician. Laurie first reached fame as one half of the Fry and Laurie double act, with his friend and comedy partner, Stephen Fry. Since 2004 he has starred as Dr. Gregory House, protagonist in the American television drama House. Comic actor Hugh Laurie hailed from Oxford, England, but first made a name for himself as a performer with the Footlights Theater at rival Cambridge University in the early 1980s. He quickly rose in British television as a writer and actor, best known for his portrayal of dimwits on wacky British series and sketch shows. Despite years of starring TV roles and film character roles in his homeland, most Americans were unfamiliar with the multi-talented Brit when he was cast in the title role of the CBS medical mystery drama, “House M.D.” (Fox, 2005- ). It was a far cry from his years of goofy comedy work, but Laurie was unquestionably riveting with his portrayal of the dark, complex doctor, Gregory House – enough that he received numerous Best Actor Golden Globe and Emmy nominations throughout the show’s run. Laurie was born in Oxford, England. The youngest of four children, Hugh has a brother (elder by 6 years) and two sisters. His mother, Patricia (née Laidlaw), died from motor neurone disease when Laurie was 29. According to Laurie, it took her two years to die, and she suffered "painful, plodding paralysis" while being cared for by Laurie's father, whom he called "the sweetest man in the whole world". His father, W.G.R.M. "Ran" Laurie, was a medical doctor who also won an Olympic gold medal in the coxless pairs at the 1948 London Games. Laurie was raised in the Scottish Presbyterian church. He was brought up in Oxford and attended the Dragon School, a prestigious preparatory school. He later went on to Eton and then to Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he achieved a Third-Class Honours degree in archaeology & anthropology. Like his father, Laurie was an oarsman at school and university; in 1977, he was half of the junior coxed pair that won the British national title before representing Britain's Youth Team at the 1977 World Championships. Later, he also achieved a Blue while taking part in the 1980 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. Cambridge lost that year by 1.5 metres (4.9 ft). Laurie is a member of the Leander Club, one of the oldest rowing clubs in the world. Forced to abandon rowing during a bout of infectious mononucleosis (Glandular Fever), he joined the Cambridge Footlights, which has been the starting point for many successful British comedians. 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 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 outside his rowing to become president of the Footlights, with Thompson as vice-president. They took their annual revue, The Cellar Tapes, written principally by Laurie and Fry, the cast also including Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer and Penny Dwyer, to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and won the first Perrier Comedy Award. 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 show for Granada Television, Alfresco, which ran for two series. Laurie made his first appearance on American movie screens with a small supporting role in the 1985 drama, "Plenty." He appeared in "The Secret Policeman's Third Ball" in 1987, the same year he landed a recurring role as "thickie" Prince Regent (later King George IV) in Rowan Atkinson's "Blackadder III" (1987-88). He forayed into film again with a larger part in the romantic drama "Strapless" (1989), before returning to Adder fold as the dim Lt. George in "Blackadder Goes Forth" (1989-1990). In 1995, Laurie and Stephen Fry launched their own sketch comedy show, “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” (BBC, 1989-1995), which frequently included Laurie performing self-penned parody songs on guitar and piano. From 1990-93, the pair also co-starred in “Jeeves and Wooster” (ITV), a uniquely British Edwardian comedy based on the stories of P.G. Wodehouse. Fry and Laurie 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, in which 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. They collaborated again on the film Peter's Friends. 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's later film appearances include Sense and Sensibility (1995), adapted 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; Elton's adaptation of his novel Inconceivable, Maybe Baby (2000); Girl From Rio; the 2004 remake of The Flight of the Phoenix; and the three Stuart Little films. 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, The Paper Soldier. In 1998, Laurie had a brief guest-starring role on Friends in the episode "The One with Ross's Wedding, Part Two". 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 also voiced the character of a bar patron in the Family Guy episode "One If by Clam, Two If by Sea". Laurie was the character of Mr. Wolf in the cartoon Preston Pig. He was also a panellist on the first episode of QI, alongside Fry as host. In 2004, Laurie guest-starred as a professor in charge of a space probe called Beagle, on The Lenny Henry Show. Although Laurie has been a household name in Britain since the 1980s, he only came to the attention of a broader American public in 2004, when he first starred as the acerbic attending physician Dr. Gregory House in the popular FOX medical drama, House. For his portrayal, Laurie assumes an American accent. Laurie was in Namibia filming Flight of the Phoenix and recorded the audition tape for the show in the bathroom of the hotel, the only place he could get enough light. His US accent was so convincing that executive producer Bryan Singer, who was unaware at the time that Laurie is English, pointed to him as an example of just the kind of compelling American actor he had been looking for. Laurie also adopts the voice between takes on the set of House, as well as during script read-throughs. 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 both 2006 and 2007 for his work on the series (one of very few to have received the award in consecutive years) and the Screen Actors Guild award in 2007. Laurie has also been awarded a large increase in salary, from what was rumoured to be a mid-range five-figure sum to $350,000 per episode. His House contract was also extended for an additional year, allowing for at least a fifth season to be produced.Laurie was not nominated for the 2006 Emmys, apparently to the "outrage" of Fox executives, but he still appeared in a scripted, pre-taped intro, where he parodied his House character by rapidly diagnosing host Conan O'Brien and then proceeded to grope him as the latter asked him for help to get to the Emmys on time. He would later go on to speak in French whilst presenting an award with Dame Helen Mirren on stage. Laurie was initially cast as Perry White, the editor of the Daily Planet, in the film Superman Returns but had to bow out of the project because of his involvement in House (the series is produced by Bad Hat Harry Productions, which is owned by Bryan Singer, who directed Superman Returns). In July 2006, Laurie appeared on Bravo!'s Inside the Actors Studio, where he also performed one of his own comic songs, "Mystery", on the piano with vocal accompaniment. He also hosted NBC's Saturday Night Live, in which he appeared in drag in a sketch about a man (Kenan Thompson) with a broken leg who accuses his doctor of being dishonest. Laurie played the man's wife. In August 2007, Laurie appeared on BBC Four's documentary Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out, filmed in celebration of Fry's fiftieth birthday. Laurie married Jo Green, a theatre administrator, in June 1989. They live in north London with their daughter, Rebecca, and two sons, Bill and Charlie. Charlie had a cameo in A Bit of Fry and Laurie in the last sketch of the third episode of the first series entitled Special Squad, as baby William (whom Stephen and Hugh begin to "interrogate" about "what he's done with the stuff", calling him a scumbag and telling him that's he's been a very naughty boy) during his infancy, while Rebecca had a role in the film Wit as five-year-old Vivian Bearing. Laurie is close friends with actress Emma Thompson and his House co-star Robert Sean Leonard. The group is tight-knit professionally as well; as mentioned, Laurie acted in Thompson's film script of Sense and Sensibility, and Leonard has appeared with Thompson in a film of Much Ado About Nothing directed by Thompson's then-husband, Kenneth Branagh. Laurie also acted with Thompson and Branagh in the film Peter's Friends, in which Stephen Fry played the title role. Laurie 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. Laurie can play the piano, guitar, drums, harmonica and saxophone. He has displayed his musical talents in episodes of several series, most notably A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, House and when he hosted Saturday Night Live on 28 October 2006. He is a vocalist and keyboard player for the Los Angeles charity rock group "Band From TV". Laurie was awarded an OBE in the 2007 New Year Honours List for his services to drama. On 23 May 2007, he was given the honour by Queen Elizabeth II. In addition to his comedy writing, acting, and musical talents, Laurie was also a published fiction author. His first novel, the thriller The Gun Seller was released in 1996 and became a best seller. His follow-up, The Paper Soldier, was slated for release in the fall of 2007. Laurie has periodically struggled with severe clinical depression, and continues to receive regular treatment from a psychotherapist. He stated in an interview that he first concluded he had a problem while driving in a charity demolition derby in 1996, and realised that driving around explosive crashes caused him to be neither excited nor frightened (he said that he felt, in fact, bored). "Boredom," he commented in an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, "is not an appropriate response to exploding cars". 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. |
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