Even though he was earning a lot, $700,000 per episode in the last season of the show “House,” Hugh Laurie, the main actor, feels like he made a mistake. He said he played a “fake version” of a doctor on TV instead of becoming a real one like his father wished. Hugh admitted that his dad would have disliked the shortcut he took.
Hugh’s dad, Dr. William (Ran) Laurie, had big dreams for his youngest son, born in June 1959. Hugh Laurie was following in his father’s footsteps. His dad was not only a respected physician but also a 1948 Olympic gold medalist in coxless pairs (rowing) and a graduate of a college at the University of Cambridge.
When Hugh Laurie, who was born in Britain, was studying at the same college as his dad, he planned to follow in his father’s footsteps. He was a member of the rowing team with hopes of training for the Olympics and then going to medical school.
However, things changed when he discovered a drama club called the Cambridge Footlights. There, he met actor Emma Thompson and his future comedy partner, Stephen Fry. This was during the 1980s and 1990s, and the now 64-year-old actor appeared in several TV shows, including the BBC sitcom Blackadder, where he co-starred with Fry.
You can also spot Hugh Laurie in the 1995 movie “Sense and Sensibility” with Emma Thompson, with whom he was in a relationship before. He’s in Disney’s live-action film “101 Dalmatians” from 1996 and even appeared in an episode of the TV show “Friends.”
In 2004, he got the chance to play a doctor in a new TV series called “House,” a medical drama that lasted eight seasons. In this role, which won him a Golden Globe, Laurie changed his usual British accent to convincingly portray the narcissistic genius Dr. Gregory House, who ran a teaching hospital in New Jersey.
While the show made Laurie a widely popular Hollywood figure, being a celebrity also brought its own set of challenges.
“I went through some really tough times, dark days when it felt like there was no way out,” Laurie shared in a 2013 interview with Radio Times (via Daily Mail). “Being someone with a strong work ethic, I was determined never to be late or miss a single day of filming. You wouldn’t catch me calling in to say, ‘I might be getting the flu.’ But there were times when I’d think, ‘If I just had an accident on the way to the studio and got a couple of days off to recover, how great would that be?’”
He finally got a break in 2012, after the final season of House.
Since then, Laurie has continued his work, appearing in TV shows like Veep and the 2015 science fiction film Tomorrowland, alongside another famous TV doctor, George Clooney.
In 2016, Hugh Laurie, known for his role in “Maybe Baby,” took on another doctor role. This time, he played a neuropsychiatrist named Dr. Eldon Chance in the TV series “Chance.”
“As a gambler, my instinct is to walk away from the table after even a modest win…Yet I find myself coming back, drawn by a wonderful project that was simply irresistible,” Laurie shared with the Los Angeles Daily News in 2016. Comparing his character in “House” to the one in “Chance,” which was canceled after two seasons in 2017, he said, “The characters are massively different. Their practices are different. Their attitude to life is different.”
Despite being a huge Hollywood celebrity, Laurie, known for the 2018 film “Holmes & Watson,” still feels a sense of failure for not becoming a medical doctor like his father, who passed away from Parkinson’s disease in 1998.
“My father was actually a doctor. If it’s true that most men try to become versions of their father and fail, by the way, it seemed appropriate that I ended up being a fake version of a doctor,” Laurie said. He also played a doctor in the 2005 film “The Big Empty.”
“My father had high hopes for me following him into medicine.” He continues, “I would have liked to have become a doctor myself and I still have doctor fantasies…We live in a world of shortcuts don’t we? And I took them. Dad would have hated that.”
Calling himself a “cop out,” the Blackadder star adds, “Seriously, this is a source of great guilt to me.”
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