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Hugh Laurie is a renowned British actor, writer, and director. He has also established himself as a singer and comedian. Hugh Laurie gained fame and accolades in America for his role as television's Dr. Gregory House.
Background
James Hugh Calum Laurie was born on June 11, 1959, in Oxford, England. Laurie's father, William "Ran" Laurie, was a medical doctor and Olympic gold medalist in rowing. His mother, Patricia Laurie, was a writer whose occasional essays were published by The London Times. He has an older brother, Charles Alexander Lyon Mundell Laurie, and two older sisters, Susan and Janet.
Laurie felt an inability to meet his mother's impossibly high expectations, it caused frequent clashes between the two family members. "I was a frustration to her," Laurie said. "There were big chunks of time where I think she didn't like me." His relationship with his father was quite different; Laurie describes him as "the sweetest man in the world," and "a solid citizen who wore tweed suits and was overflowing with good sense and kindness." The two grew very close during the actor's childhood.
Education
As Laurie reached his early teens, he entered the Dragon School, a prep academy in Oxford, England. He found himself fighting depression, smoking cigarettes and "cheating on French vocabulary tests." A particularly lazy student with no inclination to study, Laurie said he was unpleasant to be around, later admitting that he was "miserable and self-absorbed." Despite his lack of scholarly motivation, Laurie excelled as an amateur rower. His athletic pursuits gave him the credentials necessary to transfer to the prestigious Eton public school for boys during high school.
During his studies there, Laurie and his rowing partner became junior national champions in coxed pairs rowing and placed fourth in the World Junior Rowing Championships in Finland in 1977. The future actor pursued higher education at Cambridge University and studied anthropology and archeology. He also continued to go in for sports, worked hard to master his rowing skills, and then got a serious injury that made further training impossible.
At that point Laurie joined Cambridge’s Footlights Club, the university dramatic club that has produced many well-known actors and comedians, eventually serving as its president in 1981. While on an end-of-year tour with the Footlights, he met the actor-playwright Stephen Fry.
Hugh Laurie began his professional career from 1981, at that time he was in the final year of his undergraduate degree. After his successful audition for Footlights, Laurie met fellow student Emma Thompson, and the two became romantically involved. Through their relationship, Laurie met Footlights performer and playwright, Stephen Fry. Laurie had been so impressed by Fry's play Latin! that he insisted Thompson introduce the two men. Together, the fast friends wrote the sketch "The Cellar Tapes" with Emma Thompson in 1981, which they entered in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
After their graduation in 1981, the comedy trio won the Perrier Comedy Award for their Fringe submission. The honor resulted in a tour across England and Australia, and a 1982 made-for-TV film of their work called Cambridge Footlights Review. Thompson, Fry, and Laurie also teamed up with Grenada television to create several sketch comedy shows throughout the early 80s, including There's Nothing to Worry About!, The Crystal Cube, and Alfresco. They also appeared as guests on the popular British comedy, The Young Ones.
In 1986, Fry and Laurie continued their partnership without Thompson. They wrote and starred in a string of comedy shows, including A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1987). Fry and Laurie showcased the duo's wide variety of talents, including Laurie's musical abilities on piano and guitar. The show ran for eight years and made the pair household names in Britain.
In 1987, after several guest appearances on Blackadder, Laurie became a regular on the show for its entire third season. Laurie's portrayal of the simpering idiot George, the Prince Regent, caught the public's attention—and typecast him as an upper-class twit for years to come. During this time, Laurie also found love with theatre administrator Jo Green, whom he married in 1989.
The following year, Laurie and Fry began the series Jeeves and Wooster, a comedy adapted from P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories about a brainless young man (played by Laurie) who is helped out of various tricky situations by his ingenious butler, Jeeves (Fry). The show ran for four seasons until its end in 1993.
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 dramatized 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.
During the mid-1990s, Laurie branched out into films, music, and writing. He appeared alongside friend and former girlfriend, Emma Thompson, in the film version of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1995). He also began a voice-acting career for children's films such as The Snow Queen's Revenge (1995) and The Ugly Duckling (1997). In 1996, he played a clumsy villain in the Disney hit, 101 Dalmatians and a year later, appeared in the film The Borrowers and the Spice Girls vehicle, Spice World. In 1999, Laurie appeared in another children's film about a mouse, Stuart Little, and returned for its sequels in 2002 and 2005.
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. He returned to the small screen in 2003 as a director and actor in the television comedy-drama Fortysomething. The show was canceled after one season. 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 panelist 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.
It wasn't until 2004, however, that the actor achieved recognition on both sides of the Atlantic for his role as a maverick medic in the TV series House. He adopted an American drawl for his portrayal of the tortured and erratic but brilliant Dr. Gregory House in the television medical drama, House. Laurie was nominated for an Emmy Award for his role in House in 2005. Although he did not win, he did receive a Golden Globe in both 2006 and 2007 for his work on the series and the Screen Actors Guild award in 2007 and 2009. Laurie was also awarded a large increase in salary, from what was rumored to be a mid-range five-figure sum to $350,000 per episode. 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 while presenting an Emmy with Dame Helen Mirren and has since been nominated in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.
In August 2007, Laurie appeared on BBC Four's documentary Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out, filmed in celebration of Fry's 50th birthday. In 2008, Laurie took part in Blackadder Rides Again and appeared as Captain James Biggs in Street Kings, opposite Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker, and then in 2009 as the eccentric Dr. Cockroach, Ph.D. in DreamWorks' Monsters vs. Aliens. He also hosted Saturday Night Live for the second time on the Christmas show in which he sang a medley of three-second Christmas songs to close his monologue. In 2009, Laurie returned to guest star in another Family Guy episode, "Business Guy", parodying Gregory House. In 2010, Laurie guest starred in The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror XXI".
Since House ended its run in 2012, Laurie has gone on to star in Mr. Pip (2012) and alongside George Clooney in Tomorrowland (2015). In 2016, he starred in the AMC miniseries The Night Manager, for which he earned an Emmy nomination and won a Golden Globe award. He's also starred as Tom James in the popular HBO comedy Veep since 2015.
A talented musician his entire life, Laurie began playing the piano at age six and went on to learning the drums, guitar, harmonica, and saxophone. He's featured his talents throughout his acting career and even performed piano on Meatloaf's studio album Hang Cool Teddy Bear (2010).
Having a deep love for jazz and the blues, in 2011 Laurie released a blues album, Let Them Talk, in both France and Germany, famously collaborating with Tom Jones and Irma Thomas, among others. A second album, Didn't It Rain, was released two years later in 2013. In the same year, he played at the RMS Queen Mary together with his band. This concert was filmed and later released as Live on the Queen Mary on DVD and Blu-ray.
As well as acting and music careers, Laurie began a literature caree in 1996. Laurie's first novel, The Gun Seller, an intricate thriller laced with Wodehouseian humour, was published and became a best-seller. He has since been working on the screenplay for a film version. His second novel, The Paper Soldier, was scheduled for September 2009, but has yet to appear.
Hugh Laurie is an outstanding actor, whose portrayal of Gregory House made him one of the most popular television personalities in the entire world. His iconic role let him become one of the most high-paid television actors. According to the Guinness Book of World Records (2012), Laurie is the most watched leading man on television due to the worldwide viewership of House.
Hugh Laurie got a star of his own on the ‘Hollywood Walk of Fame’ on October 25, 2016. Laurie was also named the 2011 GQ Music Man of the Year.
(Long before Hugh Laurie was "House," Hugh Laurie and Camb...)
1989
Religion
Laurie's family observed the Scottish Presbyterian religion and frequented church, but the self-purported atheist said a belief in God didn't play a large role in his raising. He claimed: "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."
Politics
Laurie is a supporter of the British Labour Party.
Views
Quotations:
"I suppose I am drawn to people who worry, who are tortured. I find I am always faintly suspicious of happy people."
Membership
Leander Club
Cambridge Footlights
1978 - 1981
Personality
Laurie received his first motorcycle when he was 16 as a present from his father. He is an avid motorcycle enthusiast and has two motorbikes, one at his London home and one at his Hollywood home. His bike in the United States is a Triumph Bonneville, a replica of the 1960s British model, his self-proclaimed "feeble attempt to fly the British flag". He enjoys the anonymity the motorcycle helmet gives him.
Six years younger than his closest sibling Laurie often felt like an only child, struggling with his mother's high expectations of him and the "heavyweight unhappiness" which marked his teens and led to him having depression and bad habits. Laurie suffers from severe clinical depression and has been in therapy for years.
Described by Laurie's friends as phenomenally intelligent, wise and lovable Hugh's "only really annoying habit," according to Stephen Fry, is "his extreme deprecation."
Quotes from others about the person
"He's the real thing. Gifted, phenomenally intelligent, and wise." - Stephen Fry
"There's the Hugh who dances around and cracks jokes, tangos all over the place. And there's the other side: tortured, dark. I love them both." - Joely Richardson
"He's a great actor, our new Carey Grant or Tom Hanks." - Ben Elton
Interests
He plays the piano, guitar, drums, harmonica and saxophone. Also his hobbies are motorcycles and boxing.
Laurie is a huge fan of Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen.
Writers
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.
Sport & Clubs
Fulham Football Club
Music & Bands
blues and jazz
Connections
Hugh Laurie was dating the actress Emma Thompson when he was s student and several years later after graduation. Still, the couple never married. Although their relationship ended, they are still good friends.
Laurie married Jo Green on June 16, 1989. They live in Belsize Park, London, with sons Charles (born 1988) and William (born 1991) and daughter Rebecca (born 1993).
Father:
William George Ranald Mundell Laurie
Laurie won an Olympic gold medal in the coxless pairs (rowing) at the 1948 London Games.
Mother:
Patricia Laurie (née Laidlaw)
Patricia was a writer whose occasional essays were published by the London Times.
Wife:
Jo Green
Laurie married theatre administrator Jo Green in June 1989 in Camden, London.
Brother:
Charles Alexander Lyon Mundell Laurie
Sister:
Susan Laurie
Sister:
Janet Laurie
Son:
Charlie Laurie
Charlie had a cameo in A Bit of Fry & Laurie in the last sketch of the episode entitled Special Squad, as baby William during his infancy.
Daughter:
Rebecca Laurie
Rebecca had a role in the film Wit as five-year-old Vivian Bearing.
Son:
William “Bill” Albert Laurie
friend, colleague:
Stephen Fry
Fry and Laurie met during university times and became best friends and colleagues. Fry was a best man at Laurie'swedding and is godfather to his children.
