I've been a friend of Hugh Laurie's for 20 years. He calls me "Rock," the nickname he gave me in the early '90s, when I was script editor on the BBC TV comedy series A Bit of Fry and Laurie. (My mountainous complexion? My rocklike dependability?) I call him "Hugh." If I had to come up with a nickname for him, though, I'd probably go for "Gifto." He's a talented actor, comedian, scriptwriter, novelist, piano player and sportsman. He has a brilliant and unusual mind. He's ferociously precise. Dammit, he could probably get a job at NASA — though he'd doubtless tell you, in his ironic and self-deprecating way, that it wasn't rocket science.

Ah, the self-deprecation. For my money — which, I have to admit, can't compare with his — Gifto's self-deprecation is a complicated thing. Yes, he has extraordinarily high standards, of which he thinks he falls short. But the self-deprecation is also designed to make lesser talents (us) feel better. We may not have his abilities, but nor do we have his pain. At a house party in Scotland in 1992, I watched him trounce his fellow comedian Ben Elton at tennis. Afterward, he was inconsolable. That's right. He — Hugh Laurie, Gifto, the trouncer — was in pain. He hadn't achieved the tennis expected of, say, Pete Sampras. Some of his serves had been out. Some of his aces had traveled at speeds of less than 100 miles an hour. Ben Elton ended up comforting him.

Pain, like a loyal bloodhound, follows Hugh Laurie around. "We're dead" was his catchphrase on the set of A Bit of Fry and Laurie. But it's not all doom and gloom with Hugh. I'd put it at about 87 percent. To see him playing boogie-woogie piano, in a hat, accompanied by his son Bill on the saxophone, is a vision of unsullied happiness. The point is, he's a gifted, intense and complicated man. Legend has it that after playing idiots in A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Black Adder and Jeeves and Wooster, Laurie somehow transformed himself into the American brainbox and guru of grouch, Dr. House. But I don't buy into the legend. I recall, in particular, an idiot he played in Season 2 of A Bit of Fry and Laurie — a blond Australian who's witnessed a road accident. Stephen Fry plays the TV newsman who comes to interview him. The newsman explains the procedure: He'll ask a question, then the Australian should describe what he saw.

"I was standing here and this guy came round the corner," says the Australian, excitedly. Fry patiently repeats that he shouldn't say anything till he's been asked a question. The Australian agrees, then launches once more into his description. This happens over and over again. There's nothing the newsman can do to stop him froom describing that accident — except what he finally does, which is punch him clean off his feet. 

Hugh played that Australian idiot like he played Ben Elton. There was nothing casual about it, no compromise with the highest standards. He created a character so sublimely stupid, so profoundly obtuse, so touchingly desperate to relate what he'd seen — dammit, so blond — that it became positively moving.

Here was masterful comic acting, which is masterful acting, period. If you'd told me that 17 years later, he'd be the star of a hugely successful American TV series, playing a doctor with a graveside manner, I'd have believed you. Why not? He had the acting chops, the intensity, the soulful eyes. And he had a kind of comic relish that's integral to House.

There's a wonderful moment in Season 3 when House meets his patient's 8-year-old brother. He plonks himself down next to the boy and then, with a giraffe-like movement of his head, looms alarmingly close and asks, "Can I be your imaginary friend?" What's not funny about that?

In the last few years, I've barely seen old Gifto. I live on the East Coast of England. He, as you know, mostly lives on the West Coast of America. So when the awfully nice people at TV Guide asked me to interview him, I suggested we conduct the interview by e-mail, since that's now our natural mode….

For more on House, pick up the new issue of TV Guide, on sale now.