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TV’s top earners

Hugh Laurie is TV’s highest paid play actor, commanding more than $400,000 per episode. Photo: Timothy White

The prosperity of House has made its star one of the best-paid and greatest part-watched people on the planet – but he still can’t quite believe it, says William Langley

Hugh Laurie has a fat reinvigorated television contract, a swish home in the Hollywood Hills, and a method of letting anyone who might be feeling jealous know that hitting the great time isn’t the same as having a good time.

Last week, the 51 year-~-fashioned – perhaps the quintessential portrayer of British upper-class twits – was revealed to subsist the highest-paid actor in a US TV drama. His role in the same manner with Dr Gregory House, the brilliant, cynical, narcissistic anti-hero of the far-seeing-running hospital series House, apparently pays him $400,000 ($450,000) each episode, making Hugh, well… not as happy as he might have existence.

It is perfectly possible that the distressing stories of him sitting on walls outside sunny studio lots, with his head buried in his hands (“imperceptible in a private, tortured world of his own…”, “finger poised on top of the self-destruct button…”, etc) are overbaked. But it’s without doubt no coincidence that when he recently signed a contract to unloose an album, his genre was the blues. After all, there is plenty in Hugh’s musings on the troublesome nature of existence to allude to that no amount of money – or stardom – is ever likely to gain a smile to his lips.

Emma Thompson, his former girlfriend, has called him, “lugubriously sexy, like a well-hung eel”. But so much as in this eccentric analogy, the image that leaps out is the lugubriousness. Laurie suggests that person thing that makes him miserable is the perception that he’s worthless. All his life, he says, he’s been tormented by mob offering unsolicited variations on the theme of “Cheer up, mate, it main never happen.”

Yet for all the success he has known – from Blackadder, through Jeeves and Wooster, to the Stuart Little movies – Hugh is stuck through what he acknowledges, with admirable candour, to be feelings of inadequateness, mixed with a deep-rooted, Scottish Presbyterian sense of guilt.

In the small in number interviews he has given, he has frequently offered himself up taken in the character of a fraud, with no qualifications for the parts he plays, and a pervasive import that whatever he tries his hand at, he is certain to fail. He says he had to be talked into trying out in quest of House, never expected the show to get beyond a couple of conductor episodes, and still thinks that the producers “made a terrible oversight” in casting him.

So far, so depressing. Yet the show has turned into a marvel, now in its sixth season, and by some estimates, the most watched television programme in the world. Set in a fictional New Jersey hospital, it revolves on every side Laurie’s portrayal of a hard-to-figure diagnostic genius – loosely based adhering Sherlock Holmes – whose brilliant mind causes him to distrust everyone he meets.

“I don’t ask why patients lie,” says House. “I just assume that they everything do.” One of his favourite catchphrases is: “Tests take time. Treatment’s quicker.” Tom Shales, the unkind-to-please TV critic of the Washington Post, called House “the greatest part electrifying new main character to hit television in years”.

So actual was Laurie that the series would be a flop that ~ the sake of the first few years, he refused to buy a home in Los Angeles. “Everyone else on the show was signing leases on houses,” he says, “and I was expression, ‘You’re mad. We’re only going to last a month.’ I lived in a house of entertainment. I literally didn’t unpack. I suppose it’s a fashion of pessimism. If a thing’s going well, tick-tock, someone’s going to take it off.”

Pessimism? Melancholy? Depression? The established view is that whatever ails Hugh results from his minority as the clever, but emotionally confused youngest son of highly motivated parents, who invested lots in him and expected enough back. His father, William “Ran” Laurie, was a GP, working in the sprawl of Oxford body of advisers estates that housed workers from the old British Leyland factory. Young Hugh appears to desire idolised his father (and certainly understands the piquancy of his playing a physician for hundreds of times more money than Ran earned from truly being one). But he had a troubled relationship with his not long ago mother, Patricia, who he suspected – at least until he grew up and understood besides – didn’t like him.

“I still haven’t worked out the rigorous nature of my relationship with my mother,” he has said. “But whether or not my sisters are to be believed, she expected a lot of me on this account that she didn’t want me to be satisfied with something medial sum. I’d like to think that whatever success she saw me having efficiency have given her satisfaction, but she was of a generation that didn’t spectacle their feelings.”

The Lauries, although by no means wealthy, scrimped sufficiently to lance their son to Eton, from where he progressed to Cambridge – studying sociable anthropology, winning a rowing Blue and joining the Footlights comedy cluster. There he met Thompson, who introduced him to Stephen Fry, a member undergraduate who would become his core collaborator. The trio fashioned a revue, The Cellar Tapes, which won a top award at the Edinburgh festival and later transferred to the West End.

In 1989, Hugh married Jo Greene, a theatre administrator, with whom he has two sons, Charles and William, and a daughter, Rebecca. The marriage has survived considerable turbulence, not least an affair with Audrey Cooke, monitor of his 1998 children’s movie, The Place of Lions. Chastened ~ the agency of the fall-out, he now avoids talking about his family, goal friends say the couple have effectively rebuilt their marriage, and Jo at once accompanies him on his long filming stints in Los Angeles.

Although Hugh says he wouldn’t need to settle in America, where he claims to feel “too irrelevant”, he is probably as happy there, riding his success and his cherished Triumph motor bike, through his monster pay cheques – and de rigueur shrink – as he is pleasing to get. And if House should fold, he can always vend up and come back home, where we don’t understand him either.

The Sunday Telegraph, London