Despite being the highest-paid doctor on television at $700,000 per episode during its final season, House star Hugh Laurie expressed feelings of being a fraud.
He regretted portraying a “fake version” of a doctor rather than becoming a real one, as his father had hoped. Laurie confessed that his “dad would have hated” the path he chose.
Continue reading to discover more about Laurie’s choice to pursue acting instead of medicine.
Dr. William (Ran) Laurie had great expectations for his youngest son, Hugh Laurie, who was born in June 1959.
Following in his father’s footsteps, the younger Laurie had a father who was not only a physician but also a 1948 Olympic gold medalist in coxless pairs (rowing) and a graduate of a college at the University of Cambridge.
While studying at the same college as his father, the British-born Laurie was also part of the rowing team, aspiring to train for the Olympics before heading to medical school.
However, he stumbled upon a drama club, specifically a sketch comedy group known as the Cambridge Footlights, where he met Emma Thompson, the star of The Remains of the Day, and his future comedy partner, Stephen Fry, who starred in the 1997 film Wilde.
Laurie’s destiny was set.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the now 64-year-old actor featured in numerous TV shows, including the BBC sitcom Blackadder, where he co-starred with Fry.
He also appeared in 1995’s Sense and Sensibility alongside Thompson, with whom he previously had a romantic relationship, Disney’s live-action 101 Dalmatians (1996), and an episode of Friends.
In 2004, he received an offer to portray a doctor in a new TV series titled House, a medical drama that lasted for eight seasons.
In his role as Dr. Gregory House, which earned him a Golden Globe, Laurie set aside his distinctive British accent to authentically portray the self-absorbed genius leading a teaching hospital in New Jersey.
Throughout the series, Laurie emerged as Hollywood’s most beloved doctor, garnering a vast international fanbase. However, the life of a celebrity is not without its difficulties.
“I experienced some really tough times, dark days when it felt like there was no way out,” Laurie shared in a 2013 interview with Radio Times (as reported by Daily Mail). “With my strong Presbyterian work ethic, I was resolute about never being late and not missing a single day of filming. You wouldn’t find me calling in to say, ‘I think I might be coming down with the flu.’ Yet, there were moments when I thought, ‘If I could just have an accident on the way to the studio and get a few days off to recuperate, how wonderful would that be?’”
It wasn’t until 2012, during the last season of House, that those couple of days off finally arrived.
Laurie once again began making his rounds, appearing in television shows such as Veep and the 2015 science fiction movie Tomorrowland, which features another well-known TV doctor, George Clooney.
‘Simply Irresistible’
In 2016, the Maybe Baby star was attracted to a role where he would once more portray a doctor, 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 returning, drawn by a fantastic project that was simply irresistible,” Laurie shared with the Los Angeles Daily News in 2016. When comparing his character as Dr. House to the doctor in Chance, which was canceled after two seasons in 2017, he remarked, “The characters are vastly different. Their practices are different. Their outlook on life is different.”
‘Fake version’
Despite his immense fame as a Hollywood star, the lead in 2018’s Holmes & Watson still grapples with the feeling that by not pursuing a career as a medical doctor, he let down his father, who passed away from Parkinson’s disease in 1998.
My father was indeed a doctor. And if it’s accurate that many men are somewhat trying to emulate their fathers, often without success, it felt fitting that I ended up being a phony version of a doctor,” Laurie remarked, who also portrayed a doctor in the 2005 movie The Big Empty.
“My father had high expectations for me to follow in his footsteps in medicine.” He goes on, “I would have loved to become a doctor myself, and I still have dreams of being one…We live in a world of shortcuts, don’t we? And I took them. Dad would have disapproved of that.”
Referring to himself as a “cop out,” the Blackadder star adds, “Honestly, this brings me a lot of guilt.”
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