In 2004, Hugh Laurie was a 45-year-old actor of fine credentials, known to Anglophiles and actual English people for his winning TV work with Stephen Fry (the BBC sketch show A Bit of Fry & Laurie, the P. G. Wodehouse adaptation Jeeves & Wooster) and to small children for playing the dad in the Stuart Little movies. He was the last person you’d have predicted to have an obituary that will someday lead with the phrase “Hugh Laurie, best known for playing an ornery, painkiller-addicted American diagnostician . . . ”

But then House premiered that year on Fox, and Laurie’s Dr. Gregory House emerged as one of the great characters on television: prickly yet magnetic, gimpy yet graceful. House became a ratings hit, and Laurie—well into middle age, using an American accent, and generally forswearing the use of a razor—became a star and a sex symbol. “As career twists go, it doesn’t get any twistier,” he says. “Outside of the federal witness-protection program, I don’t think anybody gets to re-invent themselves quite the way I’ve done.”

Laurie now finds himself winding down the eighth and final season of House. He insists that Greg House’s dark character has not insinuated its way into his own—“If anything, he cheers me up”—but grants that doing the show has altered his outlook. “We’re undecided about moving back to England,” Laurie says of himself and his family. “This morning I was having a cup of coffee outside—a quintessentially California moment. In London you can only do that three days of the year.”