Post on Feb 8, 2006, by Ella

Laurie resumes his House calls

Hugh Laurie is back performing medical miracles as the series resumes operations

By BILL BRIOUX -- Toronto Sun

Why is Dr. House so cranky? Find out tonight when questions about House and his ex-flame, played by Sela Ward, above, get answered. The doctor is in.

After a month of reruns and preemptions, House is back with new medical miracles to perform. Tonight's episode, "Need To Know" (9 p.m. on Global and Fox), is the first new House since Jan. 10. Guest patient Julie Warner plays a young housewife on fertility medication who crashes her car after experiencing severe muscle spasms. When her condition worsens and her ailments stump House and his crack team of medical whiz kids, they start to wonder if she's hiding something.

Sounds familiar? Too many House episodes follow that same "What's the big secret?" storyline. On an earlier episode, House said that "the great thing about telling somebody that they're dying is that it tends to focus their priorities." You find out, and quickly, what they're willing to both die and lie for. But every week?

Even if the storylines seem a little over familiar, great acting -- especially from Laurie (who just won a Golden Globe as best actor in a TV series) -- keeps everybody watching. And in record numbers: The Jan. 10 House was the show's highest-rated episode on Fox since the season premiere.

Laurie was quick to downplay his acting abilities when I spoke with him on the impressive House set last month in Los Angeles. "What people are seeing -- and I'm happy not to contradict this -- is that I'm hugely trained, that I studied at RADA and that I did years and years of Shakespeare," said the 45-year-old. "None of that is true."

Laurie, who went on to appear in Blackadder, Jeeves And Wooster and other English series, says he has no acting training whatsoever and did only one Shakespeare play at University. It's that cultured Cambridge accent that fools people, Laurie admits.

He puts on a mid-west drone for the character, something he says confuses the hell out of people back home in England, where House recently premiered. "Britain is a country of Henry Higginses," he says. "They're all terrible snobs about accents and regions and dialect. They're always listening out to spot the false note."

Back in the day at Cambridge, Laurie was more into sculling than Shakespeare. (His dad, a doctor in real life, was an Olympic rower.) His family still lives in England and, despite the fact that House looks like it will run for years, he has no plans to move them to Los Angeles.

Laurie has three school-age children and uprooting them now would be tricky, he says. Besides, he adds, sounding like every other insecure actor, "things could change in a couple of weeks and we could nose dive."

Executive producer David Shore, a native of London, Ontario, is confident this House will be Laurie's home for several seasons to come. It's his job to guard against too many big secret storylines, although this is a show driven more by character than by plot, he says. "There is a procedural spine, but I wouldn't watch it for the medical stories," says Shore. "Frankly, it would bore me."

Shore's other job is to keep House as cranky as possible. "We never want to make him nice," he says. "I don't think he has a heart of gold."