James Hugh Calum Laurie was born on 11 June 1959 in the Blackbird Leys area of Oxford, the youngest of four children of Patricia (née Laidlaw) and William George Ranald Mundell “Ran” Laurie, who was a physician and winner of an Olympic gold medal in the coxless pairs (rowing) at the 1948 London Games. He has an older brother, Charles Alexander Lyon Mundell Laurie, and two older sisters, Susan and Janet. He had a strained relationship with his mother, whom he noted as “Presbyterian by character, by mood”. He later said, “I was frustration to her. She didn’t like me.” His mother died from motor neurone disease in 1989, at the age of 73. According to Laurie, she endured the disease for two years and suffered “painful, plodding paralysis” while being cared for by Laurie’s father, whom he has called “the sweetest man in the whole world”.

Like his father, Laurie rowed at school and university. In 1977, he was a member of the junior coxed pair that won the British national title before representing Britain’s Youth Team at the 1977 Junior World Rowing Championships. In 1980, Laurie and his rowing partner, J.S. Palmer, were runners-up in the Silver Goblets coxless pairs for Eton Vikings rowing club. He also achieved a Blue while taking part in the 1980 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. Cambridge lost that year by five feet. During this time, Laurie was training for up to eight hours a day and was on course to become an Olympic-standard rower. He is a member of the Leander Club, one of the oldest rowing clubs in the world, and was a member of the Hermes Club and Hawks’ Club.

Laurie was brought up in Oxford and attended the Dragon School from ages seven to 13, later stating, “I was, in truth, a horrible child. Not much given to things of a ‘bookey’ nature, I spent a large part of my youth smoking Number Six and cheating in French vocabulary tests.” He went on to Eton College, which he described as “the most private of private schools”. He arrived at Selwyn College, Cambridge in 1978, which he says he attended “as a result of family tradition” since his father went there. Laurie notes that his father was a successful rower at Cambridge and that he was “trying to follow in [his] father’s footsteps”. He studied archaeology and anthropology, specialising in social anthropology, and graduated with third-class honours.

In 1980–81, his final year at university, besides rowing, Laurie was president of the Footlights, with Thompson as vice-president. They took their annual revue, The Cellar Tapes, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and won the first Perrier Comedy Award. The revue was written principally by Laurie and Fry, and the cast also included Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer and Penny Dwyer. The Perrier Award led to a West End transfer for The Cellar Tapes and a television version of the revue, broadcast in May 1982. It resulted in Laurie, Fry and Thompson being selected, along with Ben Elton, Robbie Coltrane and Siobhan Redmond to write and appear in a new sketch comedy show for Granada Television, Alfresco, which ran for two series.

Laurie married theatre administrator Jo Green on 16 June 1989 in the Camden area of London. They have three children, Charlie, Bill and Rebecca. Laurie’s eldest son Charlie played a small role as baby William in A Bit of Fry & Laurie, during a sketch entitled “Special Squad”. His daughter Rebecca had a role in the film Wit as five-year-old Vivian Bearing. Stephen Fry, Laurie’s best friend and long-time comedy partner, was the best man at his wedding and is the godfather of his children.

In 1996, Laurie’s first novel, The Gun Seller, an intricate thriller laced with Wodehouseian humour, was published and became a best-seller. He has since been working on the screenplay for a film version. His second novel, The Paper Soldier, was scheduled for September 2009 but has yet to appear.

Since 2002, Laurie has appeared in a range of British television dramas, guest-starring that year in two episodes of the first season of the spy thriller series Spooks on BBC One. In 2003, he starred in and also directed ITV’s comedy-drama series fortysomething (in one episode of which Stephen Fry appears). In 2001, he voiced the character of a bar patron in the Family Guy episode “One If by Clam, Two If by Sea”. Laurie voiced the character of Mr. Wolf in the cartoon Preston Pig. He was a panellist on the first episode of QI, alongside Fry as host. In 2004, Laurie guest-starred as a professor in charge of a space probe called Beagle, on The Lenny Henry Show.

Between 2004 and 2012, Laurie starred as an acerbic physician specialising in diagnostic medicine, Dr. Gregory House, in the Fox medical drama House. For his portrayal, he assumed an American accent. He was in Namibia filming Flight of the Phoenix and recorded his audition tape for the show in the bathroom of the hotel, as it was the only place he could get enough light. Jacob Vargas operated the camera for the audition tape. Laurie’s American accent was so convincing that executive producer Bryan Singer, who was unaware at the time that Laurie was British, pointed to him as an example of just the kind of “compelling American actor” he had been looking for. Laurie also adopted the accent between takes on the set of House, as well as during script read-throughs, although he used his native accent when directing the episode “Lockdown”. He also served as director for the episode “The C-Word”.

Laurie was nominated for an Emmy Award for his role in House in 2005. Although he did not win, he did receive a Golden Globe in both 2006 and 2007 for his work on the series and the Screen Actors Guild award in 2007 and 2009. Laurie was also awarded a large increase in salary, from what was rumoured to be a mid-range five-figure sum to $350,000 per episode. Laurie was not nominated for the 2006 Emmys, apparently to the outrage of Fox executives, but he still appeared in a scripted, pre-taped intro, where he parodied his House character by rapidly diagnosing host Conan O’Brien and then proceeded to grope him as the latter asked him for help to get to the Emmys on time. He would later go on to speak in French while presenting an Emmy with Dame Helen Mirren, and has since been nominated in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.

Laurie was initially cast as Perry White, the editor of the Daily Planet, in Singer’s film Superman Returns but had to bow out of the project because of his commitment to House. In July 2006, Laurie appeared on Inside the Actors Studio, where he also performed one of his own comic songs, “Mystery”, accompanying himself on the piano. He hosted NBC’s Saturday Night Live, in which he appeared in drag in a sketch about a man (Kenan Thompson) with a broken leg who accuses his doctor of being dishonest. Laurie played the man’s wife.

Laurie took piano lessons from the age of six. He sings and plays the piano, guitar, drums, harmonica, and saxophone. He has displayed his musical talents throughout his acting career, such as on A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, House and when he hosted Saturday Night Live in October 2006. He is a vocalist and keyboard player for the Los Angeles charity rock group Band From TV.

While appearing on Inside the Actors Studio in 2006, he discussed his struggles with severe clinical depression. He told host James Lipton that he first concluded he had a problem whilst driving in a charity demolition derby, during which he realised that seeing two cars collide and explode made him feel bored rather than excited or frightened; he quipped that “boredom is not an appropriate response to exploding cars”. He continues to have regular sessions with a psychotherapist.

In August 2007, Laurie appeared on BBC Four’s documentary Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out, filmed in celebration of Fry’s 50th birthday. In 2008, he took part in Blackadder Rides Again and appeared as Captain James Biggs in Street Kings, opposite Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker, and then in 2009 as the eccentric Dr. Cockroach, PhD in DreamWorks’ Monsters vs. Aliens. He also hosted Saturday Night Live for the second time on the Christmas show in which he sang a medley of three-second Christmas songs to close his monologue. In 2009, Laurie returned to guest star in another Family Guy episode, “Business Guy”, parodying Gregory House. In 2010, Laurie guest starred in The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror XXI” as Roger, a castaway who is planning a murder scheme on a ship during Homer and Marge’s second honeymoon.

On 23 May 2007, Laurie was awarded the Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), in the 2007 New Year Honours, for services to drama. Laurie was advanced to a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to drama in the 2018 New Year Honours.

Fry and Laurie worked together on various projects throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Among them were the Blackadder series, written by Ben Elton and Richard Curtis, starring Rowan Atkinson, with Laurie in various roles, including Prince George and Lieutenant George. Other projects followed, of which one was their BBC sketch comedy series A Bit of Fry & Laurie; another project was Jeeves and Wooster, an adaptation of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories, in which Laurie played Jeeves’s employer, the amiable twit Bertie Wooster. He and Fry participated in charity stage events, such as Hysteria! 1, 2 & 3 and Amnesty International’s The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, Comic Relief TV shows and the variety show Fry and Laurie Host a Christmas Night with the Stars. They collaborated again on the film Peter’s Friends (1992) and came together for a retrospective show in 2010 titled Fry and Laurie Reunited.

On 26 July 2010, it was announced that Laurie would be releasing a blues album after signing a contract with Warner Bros. Records. The album, called Let Them Talk, was released in France on 18 April 2011 and in Germany on 29 April. The album features collaborations from well-known artists such as Tom Jones, Irma Thomas and Dr. John.

On 1 May 2011, Laurie and a jazz quintet closed the 2011 Cheltenham Jazz Festival to great acclaim. He followed that up as the subject of the 15 May 2011 episode of ITV’s series Perspectives, explaining his love for the music of New Orleans and playing music, from his album Let Them Talk, at studios and live venues in the city itself. He was the subject of PBS Great Performances Let them Talk, also about New Orleans jazz, first broadcast on 30 September 2011.

On 8 February 2012, Fox announced that season eight of House would be the last. On 13 June 2012, the media announced that Laurie was in negotiations to play the villain in RoboCop, a remake of the original RoboCop film. These negotiations ultimately fell through and Laurie passed on the project. In 2012, Laurie starred in an independent feature called The Oranges that had a limited release. The New York Post felt that he was “less-than-ideally cast” in the role of a dad who has an affair with his neighbour’s daughter, played by Leighton Meester. The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey thought that he was “particularly good”. After the end of House Laurie took a three-year hiatus from film and TV work.

In March 2012, Laurie was made an Honorary Fellow of his alma mater Selwyn College, Cambridge.

His second album, Didn’t It Rain, was released in the UK on 6 May 2013. In the same year he played at the RMS Queen Mary together with his band. This concert was filmed and later released as Live on the Queen Mary on DVD and Blu-ray.

In June 2013, Laurie was the guest on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, where he chose Joe Cocker, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Randy Newman, Professor Longhair, Son House, Nina Simone, Lester Young–Buddy Rich Trio, and Van Morrison as his eight favourite discs. This was his second appearance on the show, having previously been on a 1996 episode, where he chose tracks by Muddy Waters, Max Bruch, the Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra with Count Basie, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Van Morrison.

In 2015 he returned to TV work with a recurring role on Veep as Tom James, a role written specifically for him after showrunner Armando Iannucci heard he was a fan of the show. Laurie continued to recur on the show until the final season in 2019. The same year he played the villain David Nix in Brad Bird’s 2015 film Tomorrowland.

Laurie played Richard Onslow Roper in the BBC 1 mini-series The Night Manager. The series started filming in spring 2015 and aired first on the BBC. He was nominated for two Emmys for his work on the miniseries and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film.

In October 2016, he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Laurie starred as Dr. Eldon Chance, a San Francisco-based forensic neuropsychiatrist in the Hulu thriller series Chance which lasted for two seasons from 2016 to 2017. In 2018 Laurie had a small role in the critically panned film Holmes & Watson.

In 2019 Laurie appeared in Veep creator Armando Iannucci’s film The Personal History of David Copperfield, an adaptation of the novel David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. That same year it was announced he would also work with Iannucci on the upcoming space comedy Avenue 5 for HBO.