Hugh Laurie
British comedian Hugh Laurie, OBE, could have easily taken another career track rather than that of well-known performer. As a secondary and college student, he was also a world-class oarsman. He wasn't the only one in the family to have a passion for the sport, however. His father won a gold medal at the 1948 London Olympics as part of the British national team.
The youngest of four children, Laurie went to Eton College, perhaps Britain's best-known preparatory school. During his time there, he became involved in rowing. He quickly became one of the nation's best, and in 1977, he became one half of the national junior champion coxed pair. In the world junior championships held in Finland that year, he and his teammate finished fourth in the world.
The following year, Laurie entered Cambridge University, with the intention of studying archeology and anthropology. He was also intent on joining the prestigious rowing team, rowing in the 1980 Cambridge/Oxford boat race. More information on the race can be found at BBC Sport
He reportedly became ill during his first year, however, and was forced to withdraw from the rowing competitions. While regaining his health, Laurie had his first experiences as a performer by getting involved with the Footlights Club, a famed undergraduate comedy revue group. In his last year at Cambridge, Laurie was elected President of the club, with fellow Footlighter Emma Thompson acting as Vice President.
Traditionally, at the end of the year, the Footlights take their act on the road throughout the nation. While on these tours, he met, via Thompson, a young playwright named Stephen Fry . They collaborated on a sketch called The Cellar Tapes , which they entered in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1981. They were awarded "Pick of the Fringe," enabling the duo, along with the other Footlights performers (including Thompson) to go on tour through England and eventually, Australia.
Soon thereafter, Laurie, Fry, Thompson, Robbie Coltrane , and Ben Elton formed the television sketch program Alfresco , eventually leading Laurie to the famous (in Britain, at least) Black Adder series, headed by Rowan Atkinson , and also to the Jeeves and Wooster series with Fry.
It wasn't long after these successes that he began appearing in films. In 1992, he appeared alongside fellow comedians Fry and Thompson, as well as Kenneth Branagh and Rita Rudner in the ensemble comedy Peter's Friends
He subsequently did outstanding work as a character actor in such films as Sense and Sensibility (1995) and 101 Dalmations (1996). In 1999, he took the lead in the adaptation of E.B. White's Stuart Little, playing the adopted father to a walking, talking, fully dressed mouse, a role he'd reprise in the film's 2002 sequel Stuart Little 2.
After a two year absence from the big-screen, Laurie returned to the multiplexes in 2004 with a supporting role in Flight of the Phoenix, a remake of the 1965 James Stewart action-adventure film about a group of plane-crash survivors who attempt to build a new plane from the wreckage. That same year Laurie essayed the titular role as the cynical but trailblazing Dr. Greg House in the primetime Fox Network television drama House .
Laurie is also a musician of note, invariably performing as a keyboardist with the rock band Poor White Trash and the Little Big Horns. He currently plays keyboards with Band From TV - a band featuring other television stars who perform to raise money for various charities. He added yet another profession to his lengthy list of accomplishments when, in 1996, he published his first novel, The Gun Seller. Married since 1989, he has three children with his wife, Jo.
“It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.”
“Americans have never really caught on to the idea of eating sheep. I think they think it's cissy.”
“Imagine that you have to break someone's arm.Right or left, doesn't matter. The point is that you have to break it, because if you don't...well, that doesn't matter either. Let's just say bad things will happen if you don't.Now, my question goes like this: do you break the arm quickly -- snap, whoops, sorry, here let me help you with that improvised splint -- or do you drag the whole business out for a good eight minutes, every now and then increasing the pressure in the tiniest of increments, until the pain becomes pink and green and hot and cold and altogether howlingly unbearable?Well exactly. Of course. The right thing to do, the only thing to do, is to get it over with as quickly as possible. Break the arm, ply the brandy, be a good citizen. There can be no other answer.Unless.Unless unless unless.What if you were to hate the person on the other end of the arm? I mean really, really hate them.”
“We went through all the usual exchanges dictated by Hollywood and polite society. She tried to scream and bite the palm of my hand, and I told her to be quiet because I wasn't going to hurt her unless she shouted. She shouted and I hurt her. Pretty standard stuff, really.”
“There weren’t many good things to be said or felt about my situation. Not many at all. But the rule is that after any engagement, won or lost, you replay it in you mind to see how much you can learn. So that’s what I did...”
“I didn’t really know the answer to this myself, but saying that wasn’t going to get me off the hook. I started talking without any clear idea of what was going to come out. ‘Because sex causes more unhappiness than it gives pleasure,’ I said. ‘Because men and women want different things, and one of them always ends up being disappointed. Because I don’t get asked much, and I hate asking. Because I’m not very good at it. Because I’m used to being on my own. Because I can’t think of anymore reason.’ I paused for breath.‘All right,’ said Ronnie. She turned and started walking backwards so she could get a good view of my face. ‘Which of those is the real one?’‘B,’ I said, after a bit of thought.”
“Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless”
“It’s good that you feel bad,’ she said, after some thought. Not much thought, obviously, but some. ‘If you felt nothing, it would mean there is no love, no passion. And we are nothing without passion.”
“Of course, they hadn’t really been happier at all. But they ‘d been days, and they’d had Sarah in them, and that was near enough.”
“The sexual mechanisms of the two genders are just not compatible, that’s the horrible truth of it. (...)This is a truth we dare not acknowledge these days - because sameness is our religion and heretics are no more welcome now than they ever were - but I’m going to acknowledge it, because I’ve always felt that humility before the facts is the only thing that keeps a rational man together. Be humble in the face of facts, and proud in the face of opinions, as George Bernard Shaw once said. He didn’t, actually. I just wanted to put some authority behind this observation of mine, because I know you’re not going to like it.”
“We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men do not have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie.‘That, of course, is the other main difference.”
“Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. Being House is like flying, too. He's free of the gravity of what people think.”
“Keep on being yourself.”
“Chier, parce que tout partait de travers. L'éclairage, la bande-son, l'action.”
“Une chemise si blanche qu'elle devait être branchée sur le secteur.”
“-Qui t'as dit que je ne le savais pas ?-Tu le sais ?-Non.”
“Nous avons échangé des civilités. Mi-scénario hollywodien, mi-bonne société. Elle a commencé à hurler, puis essayé de me mordre la main.”
“Chacun en leur temps, briques, couteaux, bouteilles et divers arguments rationnels avaient rebondi sur cette vaste surface en ne laissant que d'infimes empreintes entre des pores profonds et très espacés.”
“Plus laid aussi qu'un parking”
“Rayner avait sans doute une dizaine d'années de plus que moi. Ce qui ne pose en soi aucun problème. J'entretiens des relations chaleureuses, sans bras cassés, avec quantité de personnes de cet âge.”
“Je suppose que quelqu'un, quelque part, le connaît - l'a baptisé ainsi, l'a gueulé dans l'escalier à l'heure du petit-déj”
“Allez-vous au plus vite - crac ! Oh, désolé, laissez-moi vous mettre une attelle, monsieur.”
“I was shown into a room. A red room. Red wallpaper, red curtains, red carpet. They said it was a sitting-room, but I don’t know why they’d decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, sitting was one of the things you could do in a room this size; but you could also stage operas, hold cycling races, and have an absolutely cracking game of frisbee, all at the same time, without having to move any of the furniture.It could rain in a room this big.”
“Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.”
“The first two rooms were in the same state as the corridor. Dirty, and piled with junk. Dead typewriters, telephones, three-legged chairs. I was reflecting on the fact that there is nothing in any of the world’s great museums that looks quite as ancient as a ten-year-old photocopier, when I heard a noise.”
“The only good thing I've ever noticed about money, the only positive aspect of an otherwise pretty vulgar commodity, is that you can use it to buy things.”
“I looked at her and sighed. In another world, I thought to myself, it might have worked. In another world, in another universe, in another time, as two quite different people, we really might have been able to put all of this behind us, take off to some sun-drenched Caribbean island, and have sex and pineapple juice, non-stop, for a year.”
“I think you're a dangerous, corrupt, lying piece of nine-day-old mosquito shit.”
“It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement.”
“There's an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you're climbing into a metaphor.”
“I would cling to unhappiness because it was a known, familiar state. When I was happier, it was because I knew I was on my way back to misery. I've never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. I'm wary of happiness.”
“Because, what does it mean, to say that things aren't going well? Compared to what? You can say: compared to how things were going a couple of hours ago, or a couple of years ago. But that's not the point. If two cars are speeding towards a brick wall with no brakes, and one car hits the wall moments before the other, you can't spend those moments saying that the second car is much better off than the first. Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference.So unless we're going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes. Us, or anyone else. Because we're not comparing it with anything.”
“She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes...narrowed them horizontally, not vertically.”
“Now, my mom always said two wrongs don't make a right. But she never said anything about four wrongs, and that always left me confused.”
“[...] and as I walked, I tried to see the funny side. It wasn't easy, and I'm still not sure that I managed it properly, but it's just something I like to do when things aren't going well. Because what does it mean, to say that things aren't going well? Compared to what? You can say: compared to how things were going a couple of hours ago, or a couple of years ago. But that's not the point. If two cars are speeding towards a brick wall with no brakes, and one car hits the wall moments before the other, you can't spend those moments saying that the second car is much better off than the first.”
“Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. To say that I'd turned the offer down raised the possibility that I might not have done.”
“It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland - where we plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little.”
“This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.”
“People are more open about seeking help these days. They recognise the fact that the alternative to having a shrink is that you bore your friends stupid. So I figured that I might as well give someone 100 bucks an hour to hear my woes. At least someone can make a living out of listening to my tedious problems. ”
“I know a lot of people think therapy is about sitting around staring at your own navel - but it's staring at your own navel with a goal. And the goal is to one day to see the world in a better way and treat your loved ones with more kindness and have more to give. ”
“Humility was a cult in my family. I only got it out of my father by accident when he was very old that he had won an Olympic gold medal.”
“I never was someone who was at ease with happiness. ”
“Happiness is the twinkle in your grandmother's eye as you reverse the tractor off her legs.”
“People talk about nightfall, or night falling, or dusk falling, and it’s never seemed right to me. Perhaps they once meant befalling. As in night befalls. As in night happens. Perhaps they, whoever they were, thought of a falling sun. That might be it, except that that ought to give us dayfall. Day fell on Rupert the Bear. And we know, if we’ve ever read a book, that day doesn’t fall or rise. It breaks. In books, day breaks, and night falls.In life, night rises from the ground. The day hangs on for as long as it can, bright and eager, absolutely and positively the last guest to leave the party, while the ground darkens, oozing night around your ankles, swallowing for ever that dropped contact lens, making you miss that low catch in the gully on the last ball of the last over.”
“Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference. So unless we're going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes.”