Even though TV’s most famous doctor was earning $700,000 per episode in its final season, House star Hugh Laurie has said he still feels like a fraud.
Regretting that he played a “fake version” of a doctor instead of becoming a real one like his father had hoped, Laurie admitted that his “dad would have hated” the shortcut he chose to take.
Keep reading to learn more about Laurie’s decision to pursue acting instead of medicine.
Dr. William (Ran) Laurie had high hopes for his youngest son, Hugh Laurie, who was born in June 1959.
The younger Laurie was following in the footsteps of his respected father, a physician who had also been a 1948 Olympic gold medalist in coxless pairs (rowing) and a graduate of a college at the University of Cambridge.
When the British-born Laurie studied at the same college as his father, he too joined the rowing team, with plans to train for the Olympics and then go on to medical school.
But everything changed when he discovered a drama club and a sketch comedy group called the Cambridge Footlights, where he met The Remains of the Day actor Emma Thompson and his future comedy partner Stephen Fry, of the 1997 film Wilde.
Laurie’s path was set.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, the now 64-year-old actor appeared in several TV projects, including the BBC sitcom Blackadder, which he co-starred in with Fry.
He also appeared in Sense and Sensibility (1995) with Thompson, with whom he had previously been in a relationship, Disney’s live-action 101 Dalmatians (1996), and an episode of Friends.
In 2004, he was offered the role of a doctor in a new series called House, a medical drama that ran for eight seasons. In his Golden Globe–winning performance as Dr. Gregory House, Laurie abandoned his natural British accent to convincingly portray the narcissistic genius leading a teaching hospital in New Jersey.
During the show’s run, Laurie became Hollywood’s most recognizable TV doctor and gained a massive global following. But fame also brought its difficulties.
“I had some pretty bleak times, dark days when it seemed like there was no escape,” Laurie said in a 2013 interview with Radio Times (via Daily Mail). “And having a very Presbyterian work ethic, I was determined never to be late, not to miss a single day’s filming. You wouldn’t catch me phoning in to say, ‘I think I may be coming down with the flu’. But there were times when I’d think, ‘If I were just to have an accident on the way to the studio and win a couple of days off to recover, how brilliant would that be?’”
Those breaks didn’t come until 2012, when House ended after its final season. Laurie then returned to television, appearing in shows like Veep and the 2015 sci-fi film Tomorrowland, which also starred another famous TV doctor, George Clooney.
“Simply Irresistible”
In 2016, the Maybe Baby star took on another doctor role, playing neuropsychiatrist Dr. Eldon Chance in the 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 told the Los Angeles Daily News in 2016. Comparing Dr. House with his character in Chance, which was canceled after two seasons in 2017, he added, “The characters are massively different. Their practices are different. Their attitude to life is different.”
“Fake version”
Despite his enormous success, the Holmes & Watson star admitted he still struggles with the feeling that by not becoming a medical doctor, he disappointed his father, who died of Parkinson’s disease in 1998.
“My father was actually a doctor. And if it’s true that most men are sort of seeking to become versions of their father, and failing, by the way, it seemed appropriate that I wound up being a fake version of a doctor,” said Laurie, who also played a doctor in the 2005 film The Big Empty.
“My father had high hopes for me following him into medicine,” he continued. “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 added, “Seriously, this is a source of great guilt to me.”
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