Laurie getting used to "House" calls
Veteran actor makes splash in unlikeliest role

ELLEN GRAY Knight Ridder Newspapers
Houston Chronicle, 08-30-2005

Hugh Laurie would be the last person to tell you that he's following in his father's footsteps.

His late father, after all, was a real doctor. Laurie merely plays one on TV, the tormented - and often tormenting - Dr. Gregory House, the unlikely and yet not unlikable focus of one of last season's most unexpected hits, Fox's "House."

There are parallels

But for the Oxford-reared, Eton- and Cambridge-educated comic actor, who at 46 finds himself with a whole new image as an unshaven, Vicodin-popping misanthrope - and an American, at that - thanks to a role that's light-years from "Blackadder's" Prince Regent, P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster or "Stuart Little's" father, the parallels are there.

His father, a general practitioner, "didn't actually qualify as a doctor till his mid-40s," Laurie said.

"He spent 20 years in Africa as a - you have no equivalent of it here, and God bless you for not having an equivalent - he was a colonial administrator, when the Sudan was a British territory. He was a district commissioner in the Sudan," where Laurie's two older sisters were born.

"So he came back at 40 ... with a science degree, thinking, `Well, what am I going to do now?' and with two kids, he enrolled in medical school with a lot of 19-year-olds," Laurie said, calling it "an amazing thing."

As amazing as an actor who by his own admission had "played a lot of stupid people" and "clowns" finding himself not only suddenly cast as a brilliant doctor - a role that has him up for an Emmy - but also becoming, almost overnight, a sex symbol?

Laurie's an affable enough guy (especially compared to his character), but he's not one of those actors who'll twist himself into a pretzel to give some reporter somewhere to spread some mustard. At a press conference, he recently told someone seeking stories of his own visits to doctors, that he was a person "to whom anecdotes don't happen."

But asked if his own midlife adventure, which he'd described as having a "second bite of the apple," weren't akin to his father's experience, he relented a little.

`In a tiny way'

"I hadn't thought of that, yes, I suppose I am. It's true, it is about the same time, in a tiny way, compared to the change he made," he said.

"I hadn't thought of that. So if you don't mind," he added, smiling, "I'm going to think about that later."

For now, he's content to talk about his father, who was "a total hero to me," he said, though not exactly the foundation on which his House is built.

"He could not have been more different to House. A very gentle man, a man who would take any amount of time with patients. But nonetheless, he gave me a certain amount of reverence for the medical profession," he said.

"He was my doctor, even though he wasn't, really. But of course, there's a doctor in the house, so if I put my hand through a window, you know, he was the guy who put the stitches in. And he was wonderful," he said.

Even, apparently, when Laurie "set off a petrol bomb on my leg," burning his leg "very badly."

"How did I do that? It's a long story. You know, kids, boys, explosive things. It will happen," said Laurie, whose own three children, two sons and a daughter, are 16, 14 and 11.

Though his father may have been more like Marcus Welby than House (not that Laurie ever saw "Marcus Welby, M.D." growing up in England), the actor's quick to defend his character, a brilliant diagnostician who goes to sometimes absurd lengths to avoid contact with actual sick people.

`In search of truth'

"This may be my deficiency, but I don't think of him as great (expletive) at all," Laurie said.

"To me, he's a hero. ... He's not polite, he's not someone you want to take home to meet your mother necessarily, but he is in search of truth. This is a guy in search of truth, and incidentally, that truth one day could save your life, or the life of someone you love, and that's a heroic thing.

"And he's given up a large chunk of his own chance at happiness. He's surrendered his contact with other human beings, he's surrendered a normal social life ... in order to be the uncompromising seeker after truth that he is," he said.

Shorthand descriptions of House seldom do the character justice, perhaps because even viewers who never saw Laurie on such PBS imports as "Jeeves and Wooster" - or who would never have recognized him from "Stuart Little" - sense the comic that still lies inside the leading man.

"There's the clown in House, there's an adolescent in him, a child, a playful side. There's also a tormented self-destroyer, as well. I get the best of all possible worlds," Laurie said.

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