Despite making $700,000 per episode in the final season of TV’s most famous doctor, “House” star Hugh Laurie says he feels like a fraud.
Regretting that he played a “fake version” of the doctor instead of becoming the real thing like his father wanted, Laurie admitted that his “father would have hated” the path he chose.
Keep reading to learn more about Laurie’s decision to become an actor instead of a doctor.
Dr. William (Ran) Laurie had high hopes for the youngest of his sons, Hugh Laurie, who was born in June 1959.
The younger Laurie followed in the footsteps of his esteemed father, a physician who was a 1948 Olympic gold medalist in rowing and a graduate of a Cambridge University college before beginning his career.
When British-born Laurie attended the same college as his father, he too was a member of the rowing team and planned to train for the Olympics and then go to medical school.
But then the young man discovered drama club, a sketch comedy troupe called Cambridge Footlights, where he met The Rest of the Day actor Emma Thompson and then his future comedy partner, Stephen Fry from the 1997 film Wilde.
Laurie’s fate was sealed
During the 1980s and 1990s, the 64-year-old actor starred in several TV shows, such as the BBC sitcom Blackadder, in which he co-starred with Fry.
He can also be seen in the 1995 movie Sense and Sensibility with Thompson, with whom he was previously in a relationship, in the 1996 Disney film 101 Dalmatians, and in an episode of the TV series Friends.
In 2004, he was asked to play a doctor in the new television series House, a medical drama that ran for eight seasons.
As the lead character, Dr. Gregory House, who won a Golden Globe, Laurie gave up his trademark British accent to convincingly play a narcissistic genius in charge of a teaching hospital in New Jersey.
Over the course of the series, Laurie became Hollywood’s most popular doctor and attracted a huge following around the world. But the life of a celebrity is not without its challenges.
“I’ve had some pretty dark times, dark days when it seemed like there was no way out,” Laurie told Radio Times in a 2013 interview (via Daily Mail). “And having a very Presbyterian work ethic, I was determined never to be late, never to miss a day of filming. You wouldn’t catch me if I called and said, ‘I think I have the flu.’ But there have been times when I’ve thought, ‘If I had an accident on the way to the studio and won a couple of days off to recover, how great that would be!'””
The couple days off didn’t appear until 2012, in the final season of “House.”
Laurie has started acting again, appearing in TV shows like “Veep” and the 2015 sci-fi movie “Edge of Tomorrow,” which starred another famous TV doctor, George Clooney.
‘Simply Irresistible’.
In 2016, the “Maybe Baby” star was attracted to a role in which he would again play a doctor, neuropsychiatrist Dr. Eldon Chance, in the TV series “Chance.”
“As a gambler, I instinctively walk away from the table after even a modest win … And yet I return, drawn by a wonderful project that was simply irresistible,” Laurie told the Los Angeles Daily News in 2016. Comparing his role as Dr. House to that of the doctor on the series “Chance,” which was canceled after two seasons in 2017, he adds: “The characters are very different. Their practices are different. They have different attitudes towards life.”
‘Fake Version’
Despite his huge Hollywood celebrity fame, the 2018 “Holmes & Watson” star can’t shake the feeling that by not becoming a medical professional, he failed his father, who died of Parkinson’s disease in 1998.
“My father really was a doctor. And if it’s true that most men aspire to be like their father and fail miserably by the way, then it’s fitting that I became a faux version of a doctor,” says Laurie, who also played a doctor in the 2005 film ”The Big Empty.”
“My father had high hopes that I would follow him into medicine.” I would have liked to be a doctor myself, and I still have fantasies about doctors… We live in a world of shortcuts, don’t we? And I took them. My father would have hated it.”
Calling himself a “renegade”, the Blackadder star adds: “Seriously, it’s a source of great guilt for me.”
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