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“I was an awkward and frustrating child. She had very high expectations of me, which I constantly disappointed,” he said. “She had moments of not liking me. When I say moments, I use the word to cover months.”

He has suggested that his mother, “contemptuous of the goal of happiness”, helped to shape his portrayal of the seemingly brutal Dr House.

Letting the family down became a familiar concern. Through his years at the Dragon School and Eton he was expected to follow his father into the medical profession. “I wanted to, and was going to choose the right subjects at school, but I copped out. This is a source of great guilt to me.”

By his account he cheated in French tests, smoked in the school toilets and his reports were chronic. “I was lazy. I lied. About everything, all the time.”

He did excel at one thing: rowing. An athletic 6ft 2in, he and his team-mate won the national junior championship for coxed pairs in 1977. In the same year, they came fourth in the world junior championship.

At Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he read anthropology and archeology, he was a member of the Cambridge team that famously lost the 1980 boat race to Oxford by a mere 5ft. He gave up the sport during a bout of glandular fever, leading him to feel he had copped out once again when he discovered, by accident, that his father had won a gold medal for rowing in the coxless pairs during the 1948 London Olympics.

Laurie found the medal while rummaging in the attic. “My father was very modest. He never told me.”

Heading for a poor degree, he joined the Cambridge Footlights company and fell in with a group who became lifelong friends. Thompson met him in their first term. “He was a rowing blue. Gigantic. He looked a bit like Indiana Jones, wearing a lot of khaki. I jabbed my friend in the ribs and said, ‘Star!’ I knew at once. He was always so funny, the funniest person I’ve met.”

It was all very chummy. Laurie was elected president of Footlights and Thompson, his vice-president, introduced him to Fry. At the Edinburgh Festival their revue won the Perrier award and went on a three-month tour of Australia. Thompson joked: “By the time we came back, they (Fry and Laurie) were married.”

The Fry and Laurie double act had formed in Laurie’s college rooms, where they co-wrote the Footlights Christmas pantomime. The Edinburgh show was the prototype for a BBC series and later a Channel 4 show called Saturday Live, the essence of mid-1980s popular culture. Its four resident turns were Ben Elton, Harry Enfield, Fry and Laurie.

The partnership endured in their series A Bit of Fry and Laurie, followed by Jeeves and Wooster and Blackadder. It was not long after these successes that Laurie began appearing in films, initially alongside Fry, Thompson and her then boyfriend Kenneth Branagh in the ultimate British luvvie movie, Peter’s Friends.

Emerging as a character actor, Laurie had roles in Sense and Sensibility, superbly adapted by Thompson, and 101 Dalmatians. In America he was best known for starring alongside a mouse in Stuart Little. But nobody had any idea he was English when he turned up to audition for House. “I didn’t want to fail again at an audition I knew I could have done well,” he said. “So I worked at it and I did get it right.”

There are glimmers of perverse happiness in his life. Playing music makes him forget his worries and he takes pleasure in identifying with Dr House’s grumpiness. His executive producer is not fooled: “While House is a bit of an asshole, Hugh is kind and gentle and giving and that comes through on the screen.”

One moment of Zen-like serenity sticks in his mind. His Stuart Little co-star Geena Davis once competed for a place on the US Olympic archery team. The discipline of archery, he found, stilled the troubling internal voice that said: “The trouble with luck is that it can end.” Perhaps he can finally accept he has scored a deserved bull’s-eye.