Even though the most famous doctor on TV was raking in $700,000 per episode in the final season of House, its star, Hugh Laurie, confessed to feeling like a fraud.
Laurie regretted playing “a phony version” of a doctor instead of becoming a real one as his father had wished. He admitted that his “dad would have loathed” the shortcut he took.
Read on to learn more about Laurie’s decision to pursue acting over a medical career.
Dr. William (Ran) Laurie had high hopes for his youngest son, Hugh Laurie, born in June 1959.
Young Hugh was initially following in the footsteps of his respected father, a physician who, before starting his medical career, won an Olympic gold medal in the coxless pairs (rowing) at the 1948 Olympics and graduated from a Cambridge University college.
When the British – born Laurie studied at the same college as his dad, he was also on the rowing team, with plans to train for the Olympics and then attend medical school.
However, the young man discovered a drama club, a sketch comedy troupe named the Cambridge Footlights. There, he met Emma Thompson, who later starred in The Remains of the Day, and his future comedy partner, Stephen Fry, known for the 1997 film Wilde.
Laurie’s Fate Was Sealed
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the now 64 – year – old actor appeared in several TV shows. One was the BBC sitcom Blackadder, where he co – starred with Fry.
He also had roles in 1995’s Sense and Sensibility with Thompson, with whom he had an earlier relationship, Disney’s live – action film 101 Dalmatians (1996), and an episode of Friends.
In 2004, he got the chance to play a doctor in a new TV series called House, a medical drama that lasted for eight seasons.
In his Golden Globe – winning role as the lead, Dr. Gregory House, Laurie dropped his trademark British accent to convincingly portray the narcissistic genius heading a teaching hospital in New Jersey.
During the show’s run, Laurie became Hollywood’s most popular doctor and amassed a huge global fan base. But being a celebrity came with its own set of challenges.
“I had some really tough times, dark days when it felt like there was no way out,” Laurie said in a 2013 interview with Radio Times (as reported by the Daily Mail). “With my strong Presbyterian work ethic, I was dead – set on never being late and never missing a day of filming. You’d never catch me calling in saying, ‘I think I’m coming down with the flu.’ But there were times when I’d think, ‘If I could just have an accident on the way to the studio and get a couple of days off to recover, that would be great!’”
Those couple of days off didn’t come until 2012, with the final season of House.
Laurie then resumed his acting career, appearing in TV shows like Veep and the 2015 science – fiction film Tomorrowland, which also starred another famous TV doctor, George Clooney.
‘Simply Irresistible’
In 2016, the star of Maybe Baby was drawn to a role where he’d play a doctor again, this time a neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Eldon Chance, in the TV series Chance.
“As a bit of a gambler, my instinct is to walk away from the table after even a small win…Yet I find myself coming back, lured by a wonderful project that was just too good to resist,” Laurie told the Los Angeles Daily News in 2016. Comparing his role as Dr. House to the one in Chance, which was canceled after two seasons in 2017, he added, “The characters are vastly different. Their practices are different. Their outlooks on life are different.”
‘Fake Version’
Despite his huge Hollywood fame, the star of 2018’s Holmes & Watson couldn’t shake the feeling that by not becoming a real doctor, he’d let his father down. His father, who passed away from Parkinson’s disease in 1998, had high hopes for him to follow in his medical footsteps.
“My father was actually a doctor. And if it’s true that most men try to become like their fathers, and usually fall short, it seemed fitting that I ended up being a fake doctor,” said Laurie, who also played a doctor in the 2005 film The Big Empty.
“My father had great expectations for me to go into medicine.” He continued, “I would have liked to become a doctor myself, and I still have doctor – related daydreams…We live in a world full of shortcuts, don’t we? And I took them. Dad would have hated that.”
Calling himself a “quitter,” the Blackadder star added, “Seriously, this is a major source of guilt for me.”
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