Hugh Laurie

Born: 11th June 1959
Where: Oxford, England

Despite winning performances on TV and sterling support on the big screen, decent lead roles appear to have eluded Laurie.

His performances as the Prince Regent and Lieutenant George Burton-Tufton in Blackadder and Wooster opposite Stephen Fry's Jeeves won him an army of admirers.

Similarly, he acquitted himself well in the support roles of Mr Palmer in Sense and Sensibility and Jasper in 101 Dalmations.

However, his choice of lead roles - Sam Bell in Maybe Baby and Raymond in Girl from Rio - have shown severe lapses of judgement.

The son of a GP (who also won an Olympic gold medal for rowing), Laurie was the youngest of four children.

An old Etonian who went onto Cambridge University, he rowed for the England youth team in 1977 and for Cambridge in 1980.

He first took up acting after he was laid low by an attack of glandular fever and thought it might get him girls.

He met Emma Thompson at Cambridge in 1978 when they both joined the Footlights theatre company, and was introduced to Fry.

Laurie co-wrote and performed, with Fry, the hour-long BBC special A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which went on to become a long-running television series.

He also was a regular fixure in the Blackadder saga penned by Ben Elton and Richard "Notting Hill" Curtis.

Apart from acting and comedy, he has written the best-selling thriller The Gun Seller, for which he is working on a screenpplay.

His big screen debut came in Peter's Friends and he also had small roles in The Borrowers and Spice World.

He made a successful transfer across the Atlantic to play Stuart Little's adopted human father in the both the original and the sequel of the charming kids comedy.

Maybe Baby, Ben Elton's comic script about a couple trying to conceive, was his first lead role.

He next played Raymond, a suburban banker who flees to Brazil to meet a samba queen, in the lacklustre Girl From Rio.

American TV work followed and in 2005 he played a starchy company man in John Moore's remake of The Flight of the Phoenix.

Offscreen, Laurie is married to theatre director Jo Green and plays in a r'n'b band with Lenny Henry - Poor White Trash.