I am an idiot. I am! A complete and utter idiot.’ Hugh Laurie stretches his long, thin face, bringing a rubbery expression of astonishment to it; he turns down his lips; his brows corrugate; his electric-blue, blazing eyes boggle. He does make himself look a creditable idiot, or a lanky schoolboy caught in a spasm of acute self-consciousness. He calls himself berk, fraud, twit. He uses words like blimey and gosh and oh heck, like a blathering fool from an antique issue of Boy’s Own . ‘Joke,’ he says apologetically as soon as he makes one, anxious lest I miss it. ‘Sorry,’ he says at the end of long sentences, staring at me helplessly, ’sorry I’m talking such tosh, such twaddle; I know I must be disappointing you.’ Then he half-covers his sad-fool mouth with a hand, as if to stop any more treacherous words escaping. It should be annoying, this hectic English ruefulness. It should be a kind of disguised vanity. It isn’t.
Going straight
With his boggling eyes and idiotic grimaces, Hugh Laurie has cornered the market in blathering English fools. So what’s he doing playing a sexy romantic lead?
Film Unlimited
Nicci Gerrard
Sunday May 7, 2000
The Observer
‘I am an idiot. I am! A complete and utter idiot.’ Hugh Laurie stretches his long, thin face, bringing a rubbery expression of astonishment to it; he turns down his lips; his brows corrugate; his electric-blue, blazing eyes boggle. He does make himself look a creditable idiot, or a lanky schoolboy caught in a spasm of acute self-consciousness. He calls himself berk, fraud, twit. He uses words like blimey and gosh and oh heck, like a blathering fool from an antique issue of Boy’s Own . ‘Joke,’ he says apologetically as soon as he makes one, anxious lest I miss it. ‘Sorry,’ he says at the end of long sentences, staring at me helplessly, ’sorry I’m talking such tosh, such twaddle; I know I must be disappointing you.’ Then he half-covers his sad-fool mouth with a hand, as if to stop any more treacherous words escaping. It should be annoying, this hectic English ruefulness. It should be a kind of disguised vanity. It isn’t.
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‘The secret is out. He’s a great actor, our new Cary Grant or Tom Hanks,’ says Ben Elton, who has just directed him in his own directorial debut, Maybe Baby, casting Laurie against the apparent grain of his acting talent as the romantic lead.
‘He is very loveable,’ says Emma Thompson, who was, many years ago, his girlfriend, and has been his friend for two decades. ‘He is one of those rare people who manages to be lugubriously sexy, like a well-hung eel.’
‘He’s a remarkable man to know,’ says his great friend Stephen Fry. ‘I owe him everything. He’s the real thing. Gifted, phenomenally intelligent, and wise.’
‘And he’s beautiful,’ says Ben Elton.
‘Yes,’ says Joely Richardson, who plays opposite him in Maybe Baby . ‘Hugh is mysterious, and very beautiful.’
‘Blimey!’ says Laurie, stretching his beautiful eyes until they look as if they will pop out, grimacing wildly. ‘Gosh!’
But it is true. When Hugh Laurie stops pulling the face of amiable fool, his own face is beautiful: gaunt, vulnerable, tender, sweet, strangely haunted. And although it may be hard to imagine him playing the lead in a romantic comedy, it’s difficult, once you’ve seen him doing it, to remember this is his first shot at doing it. Maybe Baby is the story of Sam and Lucy, who are happy in love, successful at work (he’s a TV commissioning editor, she a theatrical agent), surrounded by friends. But they cannot make a baby, no matter how enthusiastically they try. The high spirits of the opening scenes - sexy underwear, acupuncture, intercourse along the ley lines - present a familiar Hugh Laurie, the rueful Englishman with the turned-down smile and high-rise eyebrows making quips between the sheets. Gradually, the pleasure recedes with the onset of sperm tests and hormonal injections. Unable to create at work, Sam finally breaks his writer’s block by betraying Lucy and turning their story into a TV drama. Things fall apart, and the comedy becomes a tale of loss. Here is a new Laurie, letting himself stand still and quiet, not hiding behind the gestures, grief-struck and unravelling. ‘Amazing despair,’ agrees Emma Thompson, who also appears in the film. ‘But that’s very much part of Hugh - an existential despair.’
When we meet, he says that he found it hard, indeed ‘almost unbearable’, to watch himself in Maybe Baby. When takes of the film were played back on the monitor, he would put his head in his hands. He never watches himself, he says. He hates to read articles about himself (’interviews, they steal your soul, your identity, your privacy - so you can just make stuff up if you want’). He can’t bear the sound of his own voice. ‘Inside your head, your voice is interesting; it goes up and down and is full of light and shade and emotion. When you hear it, though, it’s… uh… it’s horrible. Retarded.’ Difficult for an actor, I suggest, to hate the look of his face and the sound of his voice. He seems surprised: ‘Don’t most people think that of themselves? Unless they are exceptionally attractive. Most of us, though, don’t we wince at how far short we fall from the picture we have of ourselves?’ Self-mocking voice: ‘Blimey, I thought those trousers looked good on me.’
Ben Elton, who has known Hugh Laurie for nearly 20 years, cast him in Maybe Baby because ‘I always felt with Hugh that there was a secret waiting to be let out. He thinks a great deal. He is not good at selling himself. Of course he’s terrific at comedy, playing the amiables and idiots, but those who know him well - and not that many do - know that as well as doubt and insecurity he has great inner strength; huge depth and thoughtfulness. When I asked him to play Sam, he was all: “Blimey, Ben! Do you think I can do it?” But when I looked at him through the camera, the vulnerability was heartbreaking. He is a complicated fellow, and really quite special.’
Joely Richardson also calls him special. ‘I met him during 101 Dalmatians. I was sort of fascinated by him; I found him mysterious. There is a lot more to him than comedy - though he is brilliant at that, he has comic timing no amount of money can buy. Ben had to fight to have Hugh as his leading man; it was a risk. And Hugh, he didn’t feel he deserved to be there. He was very nervous. But as an actor he was also hugely brave. He bares his soul at the end of the film. So it was a risk absolutely worth taking, for both of them.
‘Hugh has this heartbreaking quality. When his face is still, the pathos is extraordinary. There are two sides to him. There’s the Hugh who dances around and cracks jokes, tangos all over the place. And there’s the other side: tortured, dark. I love them both.’
Laurie says he was very apprehensive before the film about acting grief, and afterwards he was ‘very shaken. I felt as if I’d had a near-miss in a car crash. I was physically shaking. Thing is, I’ve never trained as an actor. I’ve got no diploma in acting out grief. I don’t know the “normal” way to do it.’ He drinks a slurp of coffee and stares past me. ‘ The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that’s a good title, don’t you think?’ he asks, unexpectedly. ‘This is the big struggle. Is the object to care utterly, or not to care at all? Should I access grief, as they put it, and trust the camera will see that, so if I’m feeling something truthful, that will emerge? Or am I going for the lightness of grief? Do I just have to resemble grief, represent it, and not let myself be filled with it? It’s like that famous example in Marathon Man, with Laurence Olivier saying to Dustin Hoffman: “You should try acting, dear boy, it’s an awful lot easier.”‘
Which was he, then, heavy or light? He lights the first of many cigarettes, after he has courteously asked my permission. ‘The truth is, I don’t know. I don’t know what I would do again if I had to. I’ve not trained in this job, acting. I don’t feel like an actor. What does an actor feel like? Not like me, anyway.’
Instead, he says, he feels like a tree - or like the little bit of bark on the tree - which has been struck by lightning. (Has lightning struck your tree, they say in Hollywood, meaning the electric dazzle of fame.) Hugh Laurie is, to anyone looking at his life from the outside, a success. He grimaces every time this word is said; luck, he says, it has only been a matter of luck. He grew up the youngest son of a GP. He went to the Dragon School, Eton, where he dreamed of being an action man, a policeman, an actor. Then to Cambridge to study anthropology, where he won a blue in rowing and was president of Footlights, and got a third. He met Emma Thompson here, and Stephen Fry and Tony Slattery. He was part of the Cambridge Footlights that won the 1981 Perrier Award at Edinburgh, and which he then took to the BBC in 1982. He met Ben Elton and was in Blackadder. He is the Fry of Fry and Laurie . The Wooster in Jeeves and Wooster. The star in the forthcoming Stuart Little, a comic tale about a mouse, that is a huge hit in America. He has written a best-selling, critically acclaimed novel. He has close friends, a good marriage with his wife Jo, three beloved children (Charlie, Bill, Rebecca). He has money, security, affection, a future that looks bright and steady.
‘Yes.’ He pulls a contrite face. ‘I’ve been lucky. The lightning has struck my tree.’ Of course, the trouble with luck is that it can end. You have no control over it. The ‘luckier’ Laurie is, the more scared he becomes. Life is thin ice. He’s skated over it so far, but underneath are dark waters. And the other trouble with luck is that you don’t deserve it. Hugh Laurie feels unworthy.
He wishes, he says, that he had a prison story to tell, like Stephen Fry has. Instead, his story is ‘timid, dull, middle-class’. He grew up in a comfortable family, six years younger than his next sibling, a brother to whom he wasn’t particularly close. He was ‘loved and cared for. Lovely parents, lovely sisters and brothers. But I was sort of an only child, because I was so much the youngest. Sort of alone.’ He did, though, have ‘problems’ with his mother, ‘and she with me. I was an awkward and frustrating child. She had very high expectations of me. Long after I had stopped being a child, I heard from my sisters that I was the apple of her eye, her golden boy, but I didn’t realise it at the time. I knew she had high expectations, which I constantly disappointed.’ He says that he cheated in French tests, smoked in the school loos, moved his lips when he read; his school reports were ‘desperate’. ‘I was lazy. I lied. About everything, all the time. I was a fussy eater. Once Mum caught me with two pieces of liver in my pocket and sent me back to the table to eat it. It took three hours and then I caved in. I gave up on the piano - that was a battle I won. I went on hunger strike and didn’t eat for three days.’ He makes one of his faces: ‘It’s still not a prison story, is it? I’m terribly jealous of Stephen Fry for his theatrically bad childhood.’
Not a prison story, but Laurie clearly had periods of quite intense unhappiness as a boy. ‘However, I’ve never been convinced,’ he adds, ‘that happiness is the object of the game. I’m wary of happiness. It is’ - ironic tone here - ‘a snare and a delusion. It’s jolly nice sometimes, like steak and chips, but is it a goal?’ He stops for a minute and puts his head on one side, considering. ‘I have the luxury of asking something like that, of course. Because I can eat steak and chips whenever I want, and my life is secure and, well, “happy”. Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry to be talking such a load of tosh. I may have to go out and punch a policeman. Do a bit of porridge.’
After Eton - where, says Fry, Laurie could never have been a natural Etonian - he went to Cambridge. Emma Thompson met him in their first term. ‘He was a rowing blue. Gigantic. I first saw him when we were auditioning for parts in the pantomime Aladdin. He looked a bit like Indiana Jones, wearing a lot of khaki. I saw him sitting there and I jabbed my friend in the ribs and said: “Star. Star. Star!” I knew at once. He sat on the stage and did an impression of the Emperor of China trying to attract someone’s attention - it was extremely funny and clever. He was always so funny, the funniest person I’ve met. I remember once driving back from some Footlights performance, and hearing on the radio that somebody had been kidnapped and driven off in a Ford van. We were in a Ford van, so Hugh did a lot of struggling and thrashing around on the front seat, to see if we would be stopped. And I laughed so much I had to stop for a wee.’
Fry also met him at Cambridge. Indeed, he says that meeting Laurie ‘was the best thing that could have happened to me, both in career terms and emotionally. He is absolutely my best friend. People sometimes call me a Renaissance man, but I’m not and Hugh is. He’s a natural athlete. He’s a gifted musician. He is clever, perceptive, has natural charisma. Sometimes it is thought that I’m the loud mouth and the dominant one, but we have been an equal partnership. And we have not been jealous of each other - I’m genuinely thrilled when good things happen for him. And I’m particularly thrilled by the way his acting career is going.’
And his writing career, for Laurie has also, like Fry, written a novel, The Gun Seller. He is working, he says with a wide, anxious grimace, on his next one now. He does a kind of browbeating act about the writing: Gosh, how do I dare? But his publisher, Tom Weldon of Michael Joseph, insists that he is ‘unusually talented in many different ways, but in 50 years’ time, I think he’ll be known for his fiction. He’s a complete perfectionist, and very tough on himself, almost too tough on himself, but this means his books are written with incredible care. His writing is clever, intricate and at times joyous, and I am very proud to be his publisher.’
Real depression - ‘heavyweight unhappiness’ - began in his late teens and has continued through success, marriage, fatherhood. Maybe it is a chemical imbalance, he says, though he won’t take drugs for it (once, he admits shamefacedly, he did resort to St John’s Wort). He hates the idea of drugs that will alter him - and anyway, is not convinced that he wants to be altered. He wouldn’t mind having ‘a life that I like’, but at the same time admits to sometimes clinging to his unhappiness, which is a known, familiar state; part of what makes him Hugh Laurie. (’But then,’ he wags a long finger at me, ‘who is Hugh Laurie? Aha!’) He is anxious when talking of his depression, because he is so conscious that he has ‘nothing at all to complain about’. He shrivels his nose. ‘Perhaps that’s my problem - where is the struggle? There has been no struggle. Where’s the passion of my life? Where is its purpose?’ He answers himself almost at once: ‘Having children, that’s my purpose. I am eternally in my children’s debt. They stop me thinking about other stuff.’ (Fry puts it the other way round, saying that his friend is the best father he’s ever met.) ‘I have thought of killing myself when things got really bad,’ he continues, ‘but I was dwelling too much on the conversations that would be had at my funeral for it to be convincing. “That’ll show them.”‘
Show whom, though? ‘Aha!’ He looks triumphant. ‘Who? Nobody, of course. I’m nobody’s victim. I can’t remotely feel sorry for myself. In fact, I’m riding for a fall, don’t you think? I’ve had a few slips, but I’ve had no falls, have I? And the slips were all of my own making. My own stupid, stupid blunders.’
So we talk of the ’slips’. First of all, Hugh Laurie feels that he has not risked enough in his life. ‘I’ve not been tested. I remember hearing Enoch Powell interviewed, and his big regret was that he would have liked to have died in the war. I understood what he meant - that feeling of unworthiness, to continue to survive and enjoy the fruits of a victory that others die for. I’m of a different generation, but I still feel that unworthiness. I feel huge emotion when I think of the war - especially of the First World War. All those boys going down together to the recruiting office. How endlessly tragic. Whatever grand thing they were doing it for, I’ve not made the most of, have I? What is freedom? The freedom to eat ravioli at three in the morning? Not enough, is it?’
When I speak to Emma Thompson, she picks up on this yearning of Laurie’s to prove himself. ‘There are men around, fortyish, like Sebastian Faulks, say, who would do wonderfully well at war. Hugh definitely belongs to that generation. Maybe something like war would have solved his feeling of unworthiness, but there isn’t one for him, thank God.’
And Fry, who has faced his own dark nights, says that comedians are maybe cursed with a lucidity about the world and ‘therefore a clarity about themselves. So perhaps we torment ourselves. Comedy, even when it’s surreal, draws attention to the absolute and the particular. You take something big and make it concrete. It can be scary.’
Laurie tells me how, for his 40th birthday last year, his wife gave him a parachute jump. He trained for it, but when the day came, the wind was too high and they couldn’t do it. The women in the group were upset, the men relieved. ‘Us blokes, we were all there because we felt in some pathetic way we wanted to be tested, to know what it is like when the guy opens the door and says, “Jump!”, and you jump. Could I do it?’
You’re scared of failure, I ask. ‘Yes!’ He is emphatic. Very scared. ‘Very, very.’
Because you’ve never failed? ‘Perhaps. Perhaps I am so conceited I dare not risk failure. Or perhaps I dread it just because I know it will happen.’ His blue eyes brighten. ‘Call me a conceited pessimist.’
His other slip - which we approach tentatively - is that a few years ago he had an affair with the director Audrey Cooke when he was filming The Place of Lions in Australia, and was outed by the tabloids (’Hugh in Love Tug over Blonde!’). Being Hugh Laurie, the affair was not just a fling while in another continent, and being Hugh Laurie - married to a wife he loves, father of three children he adores - his guilt is still considerable. He says that ‘there is nothing to say that will make it better for anyone, so it is better not to say anything. The public exposure was an agent in the whole process; it didn’t just show what happened, it affected it.’ He adds hastily, ‘I’m really not saying “poor me” here. It was all my fault. And I was shocked by what happened. The pain. Everyone’s pain. I’m nervous of saying, in a facile way, that it has changed me. I can’t just say, “Oh I’m fine now” - that sounds like a man who’s about to start drinking again.’
Change, he says, is very hard for anyone. Until last year, he was in therapy. He began when he realised that he was bored even by dangerous things like driving racing cars. The world was flat, stale. He stopped because he went away for work, but he will probably return again pretty soon: ‘Not because I am in dire need still, but because my therapist is an extremely nice, bright woman and I find it a fascinating process.’ His eyebrows shoot up and his blue eyes bulge. ‘Did I really say that? Listen to me. “Fascinating process.” God, I make myself sick sometimes.’ Being willing to have therapy means that theoretically Laurie does believe that it is possible for him to change, ‘but actually I feel that I have just got older. Nothing does much good. I still hold out the hope that I will find ways of dealing with people that are better. More honest. In the meantime, I am just older.’
Part of this reason for feeling older, though not much wiser, is that both his parents have now died and he is on ‘the front line’ or ‘the top floor’. ‘I’m the next to jump, in fact. Yes, I will make that jump in the end. Though I’m the youngest in my family and there are other people before me. Not before me, as in to die before me,’ he adds hurriedly, ‘but before me in age and wisdom. I can ask for help and advice. Though it is not like having parents, is it? Do I miss them? Yes. Except the funny thing is that I don’t miss their company, since I was so separate from them for such a long time. I went to boarding school at an early age, and once you leave home like that, things are never the same again. No, what I miss is the knowledge that they are there.
‘My father, a lovely man, died a few years ago when I was in the States. I knew he was unwell, and before I went I made a deliberate decision not to resolve things, not to have that final conversation. I didn’t say goodbye and have the big talk. Because,’ he says, ‘I didn’t want to give him my permission to leave. I wanted him to have unfinished business, as if resolving things would somehow be unlucky. I guess I was scared to let him clear the in-tray. I regret that now, but probably I would do the same again.’
Nor did he have any kind of resolution with his mother, who died when he was 29 of motor neurone disease; the woman who expected so much of him and whom he felt he constantly disappointed; who probably gave to her golden boy his debilitating self-doubt, his dread of competition, his fear of love and risk, his endearing vulnerability. ‘No, no resolution, not at all. Or maybe very, very slightly. A small amount of movement.’ He holds up his thumb and forefinger in measurement. ‘Maybe two inches.’ Two inches along what road, I ask. ‘Oh,’ he grins savagely. ‘Say, two inches along half a mile.’
Laurie’s self-deprecation goes very deep. He continually cracks scathing jokes about himself, makes gargoyle grimaces at his own words. He calls this behaviour his ‘default system’. Fry believes that he is terrified of being seen to be cocky. ‘He’ll sit at the piano and pull silly faces rather than allowing your attention to be drawn to his brilliant playing. God knows we all feel unworthy, but he feels it more than most. He knows he is lucky, but he can never take that for granted. There are some people from working-class backgrounds who treat people like shit because they’ve come so far. They don’t need to prove themselves. Hugh is more likely to be apologetic. He’s a seriously emotional soul.’
His friends get annoyed with him for so underselling himself. ‘His extreme deprecation is his only really annoying habit,’ says Fry. Thompson agrees: ‘He is surrounded by people who love him passionately and have spent a good part of their adult lives saying, “Hugh, you are marvellous.” He is the most infuriating and the most wonderful of people. He, of course, would say yes to being infuriating and no to being wonderful. And the infuriating thing about him is that he won’t accept he’s fantastic. I don’t know if the paradox will ever be answered now. Probably it never will be.’
He is clearly well-loved. He is clearly very loveable. Nobody has a bad word to say about him, so he provides the bad words himself. ‘I am an idiot.’ He has no enemies, so he becomes his own self-wounding enemy. ‘Blimey, I’m a fool.’
• Maybe Baby is released nationwide on 2 June