Although the most well-known doctor on TV was earning 700,000 dollars per episode during the last season, House star Hugh Laurie claims that he feels like a fraud.
Lamenting that he acted a fake version of a doctor rather than becoming a real one as his father would have wanted, Laurie confessed that his dad would have despised the shortcut that he took.
Read on to find out why Laurie chose to become an actor rather than a doctor.
Hugh Laurie was born in June 1959 to Dr. William (Ran) Laurie who had great expectations of the youngest of his sons.
The younger Laurie was the son of a respected doctor, who had been an Olympic gold medalist in coxless pairs (rowing) in 1948, and a graduate of a college of the University of Cambridge.
Laurie, born in Britain, was attending the same college as his father when he was also a member of the rowing team with ambitions to train to compete in the Olympics, and then attend medical school.
However, the young man found a drama club, a sketch comedy group known as the Cambridge Footlights where he met The Remains of the Day actress Emma Thompson and later his future comedy partner, Stephen Fry of the 1997 film Wilde.
The destiny of Laurie was determined
The actor, now 64, had a number of TV appearances in the 1980s and 1990s, including the BBC sitcom Blackadder, which he co-starred with Fry.
He is also visible in Sense and Sensibility (1995) with Thompson, with whom he had previously had a relationship, and in the live-action film 101 Dalmatians (1996) by Disney, and in an episode of Friends.
In 2004, he was given a chance to act as a doctor in a new TV series named House, a medical drama that lasted eight seasons.
Laurie lost his trademark British accent and replaced it with another to play the narcissistic genius who was the head of a teaching hospital in New Jersey, Dr. Gregory House, in his Golden Globe winning performance as the lead character.
Laurie was the most popular doctor in Hollywood and gained a huge following all over the world during the run of the show. However, being a celebrity is not all rosy.
In a 2013 interview with Radio Times (via Daily Mail), Laurie explained that she had some very bad moments, dark days when it felt like there was no way out. And with a very Presbyterian work ethic, I was not going to be late, I was not going to miss a day of filming. I would not be calling in to say, I think I am coming down with the flu. However, there were moments when I would say, ‘I wish I could just get into an accident on my way to the studio and win a couple of days off to recuperate, how fantastic would that be?’”
It was not until 2012, and the last season of House, that the couple of days off came.
Laurie is once more staring, in TV series 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 actor was attracted to a role in which he would once again play a doctor, a neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Eldon Chance, in the TV series Chance.
Laurie told the Los Angeles Daily News in 2016, as a gambler, I would walk away after even a small win, but I was lured back by a great project that was just too good to resist. He compares his character as Dr. House to the doctor in Chance, which was canceled after two seasons in 2017, saying, “The characters are massively different. They have different practices. They have a different attitude to life.”
‘Fake version’
Although he is a huge Hollywood star, the actor who starred in the 2018 film Holmes & Watson cannot get rid of the feeling that he disappointed his father, who passed away due to Parkinson disease in 1998, by not becoming a medical doctor.
My father was a doctor in fact. And when it is true that most men are kind of trying to be like their father, and failing, by the way, it was kind of fitting that I ended up being a phony version of a doctor, said Laurie, who also portrayed a doctor in the 2005 film The Big Empty.
My father was very ambitious about me joining him in the medical field. He goes on, I would have liked to have been 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 despised that.”
The Blackadder star describes himself as a cop out and continues, “This is a great source of guilt to me, seriously.”
