Actor: Hugh Laurie

Hugh Laurie came from Cambridge Footlights and British comedy with Stephen Fry, in Blackadder and A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and was known almost entirely as a comic performer.

House cast him as an American with a limp and a Vicodin addiction, and he held the accent so completely that the producers did not initially know he was English. He has released blues albums, rowed for Cambridge, and written a novel.