Although the most well-known doctor on TV was earning 700,000 dollars per episode during the last season of the show, House actor Hugh Laurie claims that he feels like a fake.
Lamenting that he acted in a fake version of a doctor rather than becoming a real one as his father wished, 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 in the path of his respected father, a 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, who was born in Britain, was also in the rowing team of the same college as his father, and was to train to compete in the Olympics, and then attend medical school.
However, the young man found a drama club, a sketch comedy group named the Cambridge Footlights where he met The Remains of the Day actress Emma Thompson and later his comedy partner, Stephen Fry of the 1997 film Wilde.
The destiny of Laurie was determined
The now 64-year-old actor has featured in a number of television programs, including the BBC sitcom Blackadder, which he co-starred with Fry, through the 1980s and 1990s.
He is also visible in Sense and Sensibility (1995) with Thompson, whom he had previously had an affair with, Disney live-action film 101 Dalmatians (1996) and an episode of Friends.
In 2004, he got a chance to act as a doctor in a new television series titled House, a medical drama that lasted eight seasons.
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Laurie lost his trademark British accent and replaced it with another one to convincingly portray 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 gained popularity as 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 I am very Presbyterian in my work ethic, and I never wanted to be late, I never wanted to miss a day of filming. I would never call in and say, I think I am coming down with the flu. However, there were moments when I would say to myself, ‘Just to get into an accident on my way to the studio and get a couple of days off to rest, how brilliant would that be?’”
It was not until 2012, the last season of House, that the couple of days off came.
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Laurie once more staring, in TV series such as Veep and the 2015 science fiction film Tomorrowland, in which another well-known TV doctor, George Clooney, stars.
‘Simply Irresistible’
In 2016, the Maybe Baby actor was attracted to a role in which he would once more play a doctor, a neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Eldon Chance, in the television series Chance.
Laurie told the Los Angeles Daily News in 2016, as a gambler, his instinct is to leave the table after even a small win, but he is back because of 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, and says, “The characters are massively different. They do not practice the same way. They have a different attitude to life.”
‘Fake version’
Although he is a Hollywood celebrity of enormous fame, the actor of the 2018 Holmes & Watson cannot get rid of the feeling that he has failed his father, who passed away in 1998 due to Parkinson disease, because he did not become a medical doctor.
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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 seemed right that I ended up being a fake 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 to succeed him in medicine. 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 says, “This is a great source of guilt to me, seriously.”