
Age: 67
male
James Hugh Calum Laurie CBE (born June 11, 1959), known professionally as Hugh Laurie, is an English actor, director, singer, musician, comedian, and author. He is known for portraying the title character on the Fox medical drama series House (2004–2012), for which he received two Golden Globe Awards and nominations for numerous other awards. He was listed in the 2011 Guinness World Records as the most watched leading man on television and was one of the highest-paid actors in a television drama, earning £250,000 ($409,000) per episode of House. His other television credits include arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper in the miniseries The Night Manager (2016), for which he won his third Golden Globe Award, and Senator Tom James in the HBO sitcom Veep (2012–2019), for which he received his 10th Emmy Award nomination. Forced to abandon rowing during a bout of glandular fever, he joined the Cambridge Footlights, a university dramatic club that has produced many well-known actors and comedians. There he met Emma Thompson, with whom he had a romantic relationship, which later ended yet they remain good friends. She introduced him to his future comedy partner, Stephen Fry. Laurie, Fry and Thompson later parodied themselves as the University Challenge representatives of "Footlights College, Oxbridge" in "Bambi", an episode of The Young Ones, with the series' co-writer Ben Elton completing their team.

Robert's Rebellion, also known as the War of the Usurper, was one of the last great civil wars among the Great Houses of Westeros that took place approximately seventeen years before the War of the Five Kings begins, and lasted about one year; two, if one counts the Assault on Dragonstone as the final engagement of the conflict. It began just after the execution of Rickard Stark, head of House Stark, and his son and heir Brandon by the Mad King, Aerys II. The end of the war saw the collapse of the Targaryen dynasty with the deaths of the Mad King and his son and heir, Prince Rhaegar, and the ascension of Robert Baratheon to the Iron Throne, thus beginning the Baratheon dynasty. Despite this, the Mad King's two other children were safely smuggled across the Narrow Sea to Essos: Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen. Secretly, however, Prince Rhaegar had another son, this one with Lyanna Stark: Aegon Targaryen, who was raised by Lyanna's brother Eddard Stark as his own bastard son, Jon Snow, to protect the boy from those that sought the deaths of all the Targaryens after the war.


