Hugh Laurie

Hugh Laurie's first professional identity was as one half of a double act. Through the 1980s and 1990s he and Stephen Fry made A Bit of Fry and Laurie and adapted P. G. Wodehouse as Jeeves and Wooster, with Laurie as Bertie, a man of enormous confidence and no discernible ability. He appeared in three series of Blackadder between 1986 and 1989, latterly as the Prince Regent, which is pure delighted stupidity performed at full commitment.

That became a type, and for fifteen years the film industry used it lazily. He is Mr. Palmer in Sense and Sensibility, Jasper in 101 Dalmatians, the father in the Stuart Little pictures, a cameo as Poirot in Spice World. Pleasant work, none of it demanding.

House, from 2004, changed the terms completely: an American accent, a limp, and a character written to be actively unpleasant for years on end. What Laurie found in it is that cruelty is more interesting when it is played as boredom. House insults people the way other men check their phone, and the show's whole moral argument depends on the audience believing he is not performing. He has three Golden Globes and two Screen Actors Guild awards.

Since then he has become one of the more reliable pleasures on television without ever quite headlining again: Richard Roper in The Night Manager, Tom James in Veep, Ryan Clark in Avenue 5, Peter Laurence in Roadkill, Etienne LeBlanc in All the Light We Cannot See, and Mr. Dick in The Personal History of David Copperfield, which is the warmest thing he has done in years.