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Hugh Laurie interview

Turning 50 this year, and with a career spanning several decades, Hugh Laurie shows no signs of stopping. Gabrielle Donnelly talks popularity, pianos and parenthood with the charming star of House.

The thing Hugh Laurie misses most about England is being able to slam a door. "They just don't build the same sort of houses in California," he observes when we meet on the Hollywood set of House, flinging himself on to a chair and gazing around the reception area of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. "Well, obviously, you can't slam a door on the set here because it's all fake and it would just fall apart! But the funny thing is, when you get away from the set and go into real houses here in Los Angeles, you find they aren't much more solid than this movie set - you slam a door and the whole wall shakes."

He stops, and - because in real life he has impeccably good manners - immediately takes pains to avoid insulting the city where he lives and works. "And for very good reason, of course," he adds, firmly. "This is earthquake land, and houses have to be built with that in mind. Wood houses will withstand a quake by swaying with it, while stone ones would just fall apart..."

If anyone is likely to be slamming any doors today, it is unquestionably the fictional Dr Gregory House, brilliant physician, borderline drug addict, and arguably the rudest man on modern television. As for the actor who has been playing him on screen for five years now, well, it's difficult to see how he could be any nicer.

"I don't think I'm like House," he offers, a little uncertainly, furrowing his brow, his Eton and Cambridge-educated voice sounding in sharp contrast to the irritable drawl of his on-screen character. "I certainly don't feel him bleeding into me when I'm not on the set, and I don't particularly feel that I've become meaner than I was before the show... although maybe I'm not the right person to ask. If you asked someone else, maybe they'd say, 'Yes he has become very much like House, and is a complete pain.'"

James Hugh Calum Laurie was born in Oxford, the son of a doctor - "but not a doctor like House," he points out hastily. "My father was a gentle man, very polite, and very punctilious with his patients." The youngest by several years of four children - his next oldest brother is six years older than him - he says he grew up more like an only child than a part of a family, and was entertained by his own vivid imagination.

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