Gregory House

Gregory House was born to John and Blythe House on June 11, 1959, or May 15, 1959. House is a military brat; his father served as a Marine Corps aviator and transferred often to other bases during House's childhood. House presumably picked up his affinity with languages during this period and shows a level of understanding of Chinese , Greek , Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi, and Yiddish. One place in which his father was stationed was Egypt, where House developed a fascination with archaeology and treasure-hunting, which led him to keep his treasure-hunting tools well into adulthood. Another station was Japan, where a 14-year-old House discovered his vocation after a rock-climbing incident with his friend. He witnessed the respect given to a buraku doctor who solved the case no other doctor could. He also spent some time in the Philippines, where he had dental surgery. House loves his mother but hates his father, who he claims has an "insane moral compass", and deliberately attempts to avoid both parents. Due to this abuse, House never believed John was his biological father; at the age of 12, he inferred that a friend of the family with the same birthmark as himself was his real father. In the episode "Birthmarks", House discovers that John is not his biological father after ordering a DNA test. After a second DNA test was performed in the episode "Love is Blind", House discovers that the man he assumed to be his biological father, Thomas Bell, was not either. The identity of his real father remains unknown. House first attended Johns Hopkins University for his undergraduate years as a physics major. Before fully committing to medicine as his discipline, he considered getting a Ph.D. in physics, researching dark matter. While appealing his expulsion, he studied at the University of Michigan Medical School and worked at a bookstore, where he met his future employer and love interest Lisa Cuddy, with whom he shared a night where "he gave her everything she asked for". Years later, Cuddy noted that House, although still a student, had already become "a legend" due to his diagnostic brilliance. After the appeal process, he was denied re-entry into Johns Hopkins. During a medical convention in New Orleans, House first saw his eventual best friend Dr. James Wilson. Wilson, who was going through his first divorce at the time, broke a mirror in frustration, and started a bar fight after a man repeatedly played "Leave a Tender Moment Alone" on a jukebox. Out of sheer boredom with the convention and to "have somebody to drink with", House paid for the damage, bailed him out, and hired an attorney to clear Wilson's name (which he failed to do), starting their professional and personal relationship. Approximately ten years before the beginning of the series, House entered into a relationship with Stacy Warner, a constitutional lawyer, after she shot him during a "Lawyers vs. Doctors" paintball match. House now suffers chronic pain in his thigh and uses a cane to aid his walking, though he often wields the cane for protection, pushing aside privacy curtains, stopping elevator doors, or knocking on doors. He also frequently takes Vicodin, a moderate to severe painkiller, to relieve his pain. Although she and House have a brief intimate encounter during the second season, House eventually tells Stacy to go back to her husband, devastating her. In the season two finale "No Reason", the husband of one of House's former patients shoots him after his wife had committed suicide. At the beginning of season three, House temporarily regains his ability to walk and run after receiving ketamine treatment for his gunshot injuries; however, the chronic pain in his leg comes back and House, who seems depressed because of the returning pain, once again takes painkillers and uses his cane. The other doctors speculate his cane and opiate re-usage are due to his psychological tendencies. House eventually finds the one thing that seems to help the pain go away: practicing medicine. After he diagnoses a patient online for his team (without their knowledge), and shows his psychiatrist Dr. Nolan how this reduces his pain, Nolan suggests House resume his practice. In season seven, when Cuddy, who is House's girlfriend at this point, has a brush with death, House goes back on Vicodin in order to cope with the fear of losing her. Near the end of season seven, House finds out the experimental drug he had been using caused fatal cancerous tumors in all of the lab rats in the experiment. He gets a CT scan of his leg and finds three tumors close to the surface of the skin in his leg. He goes home, cleans his bathroom, and attempts to perform surgery on his own leg to extract the tumors in his bathtub. In season eight, House finds himself in prison after running his car into Cuddy's house, as shown in the ending of the season finale of season seven. There he learns his need for Vicodin is a weakness when an inmate makes House steal twenty Vicodin pills or be killed. Throughout season eight, House's therapeutic use of Vicodin becomes more habitual, similar to his use before season five. The final season's opening episode partly explores what path an imprisoned House would take aside from practicing medicine, revealing physics as his other forte. The episode "Body & Soul" makes a nod to this with a reference to a particle physics text amongst his books, as mentioned by his then-wife Dominika Petrova. House fakes his own death in the series finale, thus giving up his ability to practice medicine, in order to spend time with Wilson, who has five months to live. He does this in order to avoid being sent back to prison for destroying an MRI machine when an insult to Eric Foreman destroys the hospital sewage system. The series ends with House and Wilson riding off into the countryside on motorcycles, as Dr. Chase takes over House's department. ==Personality==

House frequently shows off his cunning and biting wit, and enjoys picking people apart and mocking their weaknesses. His friend and colleague, Wilson, says that while some doctors have the "messiah complex" (they need to "save the world"), House has the "Rubik's complex" (he needs to "solve the puzzle"). House typically waits as long as possible before meeting his patients. However, he impresses them with rapid and accurate diagnoses after seemingly not paying attention. House, although rarely visiting his patients, demonstrates that he is more than capable of using practical medical skills: for example, occasionally taking part in operations and reacting quickly when a patient has a cardiac arrest in front of him. Critics have described the character as "moody", "bitter", "antagonistic", "misanthropic", and "grumpy", and as a "maverick", an "anarchist", a "sociopath", and a "curmudgeon". Laurie describes House as a character who refuses to "obey the usual pieties of modern life" and expects to find a rare diagnosis when he is treating his patient. Executive producer Katie Jacobs views House as a static character who is accustomed to living in misery. Jacobs has said that Dr. Wilson, his only friend in the show, and House both avoid mature relationships, which brings the two closer together. To manage the pain, House takes Vicodin every day, and as a result has developed an addiction to the drug. He refuses to admit that he has an addiction ("I do not have a pain management problem, I have a pain problem"). In the 2009 season House goes through detox and his addiction goes into remission, so to speak. However, it does seem that House may have gotten over his addiction in the season 6 premiere. House creator David Shore told the Seattle Times in 2006 that Vicodin is "becoming less and less useful a tool for dealing with his pain, and it's something [the writers] are going to continue to deal with, continue to explore". House openly talks about, and makes references to, pornography. In "Lines in the Sand", he returns the flirtations of an underage female who is a daughter of a clinic patient. He regularly engages the services of prostitutes. He also likes to gamble, frequently making wagers. House speaks multiple languages, demonstrating fluency in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, He listens to jazz, plays the piano (as does Hugh Laurie) and has an interest in vintage electric guitars. House has often credited guitarist/songwriter Eric Clapton and composer Giacomo Puccini as his biggest musical influences, drawing parallels to those of Hugh Laurie. He is an avid gamer with a preference for handhelds (owning two Sony PSPs and three Nintendo handhelds, two Game Boys and a DS), is known to attend monster truck pulls with Wilson, and watches the soap operas General Hospital and the fictional Prescription Passion, as well as Judge Judy. House is a fan of the Philadelphia Phillies and Philadelphia Flyers. Like Laurie, he is a motorcyclist, riding a Honda CBR1000RR Repsol Edition, license plate Y91, as seen in "Swan Song", "Help Me", "Deception" and "Post Mortem"; otherwise, he drives a Dodge Dynasty sedan. House is an atheist. He openly and relentlessly mocks colleagues and patients who express any belief in religion, deeming such beliefs illogical. He does not believe in an afterlife because he finds it is better to believe life "isn't just a test". This is also an example of House's tendency to self-experiment and submit to risky medical procedures in the name of truth. Over the course of the series, he disproves the effectiveness of a migraine cure by self-inducing a migraine and controlling the effects through drugs, In "The Fix", he steals experimental medicine only tested in rats to try and regrow his thigh muscle, eliminating his pain. In the following episode, "After Hours", he finds out that the medicine causes tumors, and operates on himself in his bathtub based on a CT scan. Ultimately he is unable to continue and eventually brings in Cuddy, who sends him to the hospital. House frequently says, "Everybody lies", but has jokingly remarked that he was lying when he said so. House criticizes social etiquette for lack of rational purpose and usefulness. In the season three episode "Lines in the Sand", he explains how he envies an autistic patient because society allows the patient to forgo the niceties that he must suffer through. Throughout the series, he displays sardonic contempt for authority figures. House shows an almost constant disregard for his own appearance, possessing a permanent stubble and dressing informally in worn jeans, wrinkled shirts over rumpled T-shirts, and sneakers. House has quietly admitted, at several instances, that he is grateful for Wilson's presence, and has referred to Wilson as his best friend. When Wilson resigns and moves away from both New Jersey and House's friendship in the season 5 premiere, House is desperate to have his friend back, and hires a private investigator (Michael Weston) to spy on him. The two ultimately reconcile at House's father's funeral in a scene similar to their first meeting, only this time Wilson breaks a stained glass window with what appears to be a bottle of wine or alcohol in a moment of anger directed at House. House's legal trouble ends when Edelstein's character, Lisa Cuddy, commits perjury during his hearing. They share a kiss in episode six "Joy", sparking ongoing romantic tension. they share a passionate kiss, hinting at a mutual willingness to try to develop a real relationship. However, in season 7, their relationship ends when House starts taking Vicodin again when he is faced with Cuddy possibly having a terminal illness. The season 6 finale "Help Me" shows that despite his personality, he cares deeply about his patients, especially those with whom he has formed an emotional bond. He almost relapses into his Vicodin addiction, but this is prevented by Cuddy confessing her love for House. House has also been known to act as a mooch at times, frequently stealing food from Wilson. In "You Don't Want to Know", while House is searching for the cause of Thirteen's twitching, he claims to have stolen money from her wallet. In the same episode, Wilson observes that House's blood type is AB, the universal recipient, reflecting his desire to take whatever he can. In another episode, House reveals to Wilson that House has been borrowing larger and larger sums of money from Wilson without paying him back, just to see when Wilson would turn him down. In "Wilson's Heart", it was revealed that one of the reasons for Amber being on the bus with House during the fatal crash was that House fled Shari's Bar to stick Amber with his bar tab, but left his cane behind, causing Amber to follow House onto the bus to return the cane. ==Development==

Conception While the show was originally set to be a medical procedural, the idea changed when the writers started to explore the possibilities of a curmudgeonly title character. Shore recalled that "I knew, as soon as I left the room, they would be mocking me relentlessly [for my cluelessness...] and I thought that it would be interesting to see a character who actually did that before they left the room". House usually holds his cane on the same side as his injured leg; Shore explained: "Some people feel more comfortable with the cane in the dominant arm, and that is acceptable". The cane tricks that are seen throughout the series are created by Laurie himself. Cathy Crandall, costume designer for the show, created a look for the character that made it seem like he did not care about his clothing. She designed House with a wrinkled T-shirt, a blazer that is one size too short, faded and worn-in jeans and heather-gray rag socks. and Taavo. The shirts are usually kept tied in a ball overnight to get them to wrinkle. Laurie had no big expectations for the show, thinking that it would only "run for a few weeks". He planned to audition for the roles of both James Wilson and Gregory House. Laurie chose not to change his clothing, but to remain in the costume he wore for the film; he also decided not to shave his beard. Laurie initially believed that James Wilson would be the protagonist of the show after reading the brief description of the character and did not find out that House was the main character until he read the full script of the pilot episode. After he had watched casting tapes for the pilot episode, Bryan Singer grew frustrated and refused to consider any more British actors because of their flawed American accents. he was impressed with Laurie's acting and, not knowing who he was, Singer was fooled by his American accent. He commented on how well the "American actor" was able to grasp the character, not knowing about Laurie's British nationality. More famous (in the American market) actors such as Denis Leary, Rob Morrow and Patrick Dempsey were also considered, but Singer, Shore, and executive producers Paul Attanasio and Katie Jacobs all thought Laurie was the best option and decided to cast him for the part. Laurie was the final actor to join the cast of House. After he was chosen for the part, Laurie, whose father Ran Laurie was a doctor himself, said he felt guilty for "being paid more to become a fake version of my own father". Shore explained that he was always a Sherlock Holmes fan, and found the character's indifference to his clients unique. The resemblance is evident in various elements of the series' plot, such as House's reliance on psychology to solve a case, his reluctance to accept cases he does not find interesting and House's home address, 221B Baker Street, which is the same as Holmes'. Other similarities between the two characters are drug use (House battled a Vicodin addiction for years and Holmes was a recreational user of cocaine), successful detoxification (which proves to be only temporary in House's case), playing an instrument (Holmes plays the violin and House plays the guitar, piano, organ and harmonica) and a talent for accurately deducing people's motives and histories from aspects of their personality and appearance. Shore has also explained that the name "House" is a play on the name "Holmes" via its phonetic similarity to the word "homes". The pun does not extend to the meaning of the names, as the surname "Holmes" actually denotes that its initial bearers lived near or worked with holly or holm-oak trees, such that "Holl[e]y" or "Oak[e]s" would be a more literal equivalent. Both Holmes and House each have one true friend, Dr. John Watson and Dr. James Wilson, respectively. Leonard has said that House and his character were originally intended to play the roles of Holmes and Watson in the series although he believes that House's team has assumed the Watson role. Shore has also said that Dr. House draws inspiration from Dr. Marc Chamberlain, a professor of neurology at the University of Washington, Seattle, and Dr. Joseph Bell (who was a teacher of Arthur Conan Doyle's and thus a chief source of inspiration for the creation of Holmes), who could "walk into a waiting room and diagnose people without speaking to them". likewise, in the fifth season, Wilson uses Irene Adler as the name for an imaginary love interest of House (a teacher by the name of Rebecca Adler was also the first patient Dr. House encounters in the first episode of the series), the same name as a notable female adversary of Holmes. ==Reception==

Throughout the series' run, the character received positive reviews. TV Overmind named House the best TV character of the last decade. In June 2010, Entertainment Weekly also named him one of the 100 Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years. He also appeared in Entertainment Weekly "30 Great TV Doctors and Nurses". He was elected TV's Most Crushworthy Male Doctor over Doug Ross of ER in a poll held by Zap2it. Fox News placed the character among the Best TV Doctors For Surgeon General. For his portrayal, Hugh Laurie has won various awards, including two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama, two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Best Actor from Drama Series, two Satellite Awards for Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama, and two TCA Awards for Individual Achievement in Drama. Laurie has also earned a total of six Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. ==References==