Hugh Laurie | Biography, TV Shows, Movies, & Facts | Britannica (2025)

Hugh Laurie (born June 11, 1959, Oxford, England) is a British comic actor perhaps best known for his role on the television series House (2004–12).

Laurie was educated at Eton College and Selwyn College, Cambridge. His father won a gold medal at the 1948 London Olympics as a member of the British national rowing team, and, while at Eton, Laurie followed him into the sport. He and his partner were the 1977 national junior coxed pairs champions and came in fourth in the world junior championships. Laurie joined the rowing team at Cambridge the following year, but illness caused him to withdraw from competition.

At that point Laurie joined Cambridge’s Footlights Club comedy revue group, eventually serving as its president. While on an end-of-year tour with the Footlights, he met the actor-playwright Stephen Fry. The two collaborated on The Cellar Tapes. They entered that revue in the 1981 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and won the Perrier Pick of the Fringe Award. Along with Robbie Coltrane, Ben Elton, and fellow Footlights performer Emma Thompson, they soon were writing and performing on the television sketch-comedy program Alfresco (1983–84). That led to Laurie’s role on Rowan Atkinson’s series Blackadder II and various other Blackadder sequels (beginning in 1986), and he and Fry wrote and performed in 26 episodes of A Bit of Fry and Laurie between 1987 and 1995. Among his other comedy series was Jeeves and Wooster, also with Fry (1990–93).

At the beginning of the 21st century, Laurie took a role as the brilliant but rude and arrogant Dr. Gregory House in the American television drama House. Laurie—whose American accent on the show was so convincing that people often thought he was joking around when he spoke with his natural British accent—garnered two Golden Globe Awards (2006 and 2007) for his role and gained extraordinary popularity in the United States.

Laurie’s success in television paved the way for supporting parts in motion pictures. The comedy Peter’s Friends (1992) reunited several Footlights alumni, and Laurie later shared scenes with Thompson in the Jane Austen adaptation Sense and Sensibility (1995). He subsequently appeared in such films as Cousin Bette (1998), Stuart Little (1999), Flight of the Phoenix (2004), The Oranges (2011), and Tomorrowland (2015). Laurie later assumed the role of Mycroft Holmes, brother to Sherlock, in (2018), a comedic take on the classic Arthur Conan Doyle mysteries. He then was cast as Mr. Dick in The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019), which was inspired by Charles Dickens’s novel.

Meanwhile, Laurie continued to work in television. In 2016 he played a villainous arms dealer in the miniseries based on John le Carré’s The Night Manager, for which he won his third Golden Globe. Laurie’s other TV credits included a recurring role (2015–19) on the comedy Veep and a starring turn on Chance (2016–17), in which he played a forensic neuropsychiatrist. In Avenue 5 (2020– ), he played the captain of an intergalactic cruise ship. He also provided the voice for characters in numerous television and movie cartoons. Laurie later played an ambitious but flawed British politician in the miniseries Roadkill (2020).

As well as acting, Laurie directed TV shows and commercials and was a talented songwriter and musician. In addition to performing with the celebrity group Band from TV (originally 16:9) and the band Poor White Trash and the Little Big Horns, he released the solo albums Let Them Talk (2011) and Didn’t It Rain (2013), which were inspired by New Orleans-style blues. He wrote the novels The Gun Seller (1996) and The Paper Soldier (2007). Laurie was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2007 and was elevated to Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2018.