Dr. Gregory House, M.D., is a fictional character and protagonist of the Fox medical drama House. He is played by Hugh Laurie. For his personality and sarcasm, House has been described as a "misanthrope" and a "curmudgeon", which was named one of the top television words of the year in honor of the character. The character is partly inspired by Sherlock Holmes.

Character Overview

House is a maverick medical genius (often quoted as "medicine's most brilliant mind") who headed a team of young diagnosticians at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.

His crankiness is commonly attributed to the chronic pain in his leg (the result of an infarction in one or more of the quadriceps muscles in his right thigh), for which he requires the aid of a cane. According to Stacy Warner, his former girlfriend, he was "pretty much the same" before the infarction.

House takes Vicodin frequently for the pain in his leg and usually while dealing with a case that wastes his time or annoys him. He agrees that he has an addiction, but when his boss, Lisa Cuddy, interprets this to mean he admits to having a problem, Dr. James Wilson says that House means that the addiction is not a problem because it does not interfere with his life.

Biography

Gregory House was born to John and Blythe House on June 11, 1959, the birth date of Hugh Laurie. It has been previously given as December 21 or sometime during the late fall or early winter. His social security number was issued in Ohio.

House is a "military brat". His father served as a Marine Corps pilot and transferred often to other bases during House's childhood. House presumably picked up his affinity for languages during this period and shows a level of understanding of Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese and Hindi. One place his father was stationed was in Egypt, where House developed a passing fascination with archeology and treasure hunting, an interest which led him to keep his treasure hunting tools well into his adulthood. Another station was Japan, where, at age 14, House discovered his ambition to become a doctor, after witnessing a buraku doctor solve a case no other doctor could handle.

House loves his mother but hates his father, who he claims has an "insane moral compass." House avoids both his parents and spends an entire episode dodging a night out with them. At one point, House tells a story of his parents leaving him with his grandmother whose punishments normally consisted of abuse, such as making him sleep on the lawn or taking an ice bath. He later confesses that it was his father that abused him.

After receiving his undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins University, House studied at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine until classmate Phillip Weber turned House in for copying exam answers from him ("Distractions"). Following his expulsion from Johns Hopkins, he applied and was accepted to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where he received his M.D. and met Lisa Cuddy.

About ten years before the series began, House embarked on a relationship with Stacy, a constitutional lawyer, when they met at a Doctors vs. Lawyers paint ball event where she shot him. Five years later, he suffered an infarction in his right leg, which went undiagnosed for three days due to doctors' concerns that he was exhibiting drug seeking behavior. An aneurysm in his thigh had clotted, leading to an infarction and causing his quadriceps muscles to become necrotic. House had the dead muscle bypassed in order to restore circulation to the remainder of his leg, accepting the possibility that the release of the chemicals that resulted from the blockage would cause organ failure and/or cardiac arrest. He was willing to endure excruciating chronic pain as a trade off for retaining the use of his leg. After House was put into a chemically induced coma, to sleep through the worst of the pain, Stacy decided to exercise her right as House's medical proxy and chose a safer surgical middle ground between amputation and a bypass involving removing just the dead muscle. This resulted in a partial loss of the use of his leg and left House with a lesser, but still serious, level of pain for the rest of his life. House could not forgive Stacy for making the decision, so he left her. She eventually married a high school guidance counselor named Mark Warner.

He has had two pets throughout the series. In season 2, House acquired a pet rat he named "Steve McQueen" from Stacy Warner's house in the episode "Hunting". Initially intending to kill the wild rat, House adopted, diagnosed and cured him noticing his odd head tilt. Since infecting Steve with the disease Foreman suffered from in "Euphoria, Part 2", Steve has been seen in the background in House's apartment. House later acquires a dog named Hector in "House Training." Originally belonging to Wilson and his former wife Bonnie, Hector had similarities to House. Bonnie tells House that "Hector does go rug" is an anagram for "Doctor Greg House", whom she resented for taking her husband's attention away from their marriage. House's response was "Hector is a lame anagram. A better one would be 'Huge ego, sorry'," an anagram of "Gregory House".

Personality

As a protagonist, many aspects of his personality are the antithesis of what might be expected from a doctor or the classic definition of a hero. He frequently shows his cunning and biting wit and enjoys picking people apart and mocking their weaknesses. House typically waits as long as possible before meeting his patients, as he usually finds himself extremely annoyed by them. When he finally does encounter his patients, usually to do something his team cannot, he introduces himself in the same curt fashion in almost every episode: "I'm Dr. House." House confounds patients with an eccentric bedside manner and often unorthodox treatments, but impresses them with rapid and accurate diagnoses after seemingly not paying attention, once diagnosing an entire waiting room full of patients on his way out of the hospital clinic.

House does not suffer fools gladly; further, he seems to regard most people as fools and is on record that, in his opinion, "everybody lies". However, in the first season finale, he jokingly remarked that he was lying when he said that. House is resistant to social etiquette, criticizing it for its uselessness and apparent lack of rational purpose. In one episode, he explains how he envies an autistic patient because society allows the patient to forgo the niceties that he must suffer through.

Like the character's inspiration, Sherlock Holmes (see below), House appears to enjoy deciphering - with startling accuracy - people's motives and histories from aspects of their personality and appearance. Dr. James Wilson once stated in the episode "DNR" that while "some doctors have the messiah complex — they need to save the world", House has "a Rubik's complex" — he needs "to solve the puzzle."

House possesses a strong non-conformist or anarchistic streak. Throughout the series, he displays sardonic contempt for authority figures, from senior doctors, politicians and businessmen to nuns and God. House shows an almost constant disregard for his own appearance, dressing informally — often in jeans — and without the standard white lab coat and possessing a permanent stubble. In conversation, House often uses a mixture of modern slang and pop culture references.

House has one real friend, Dr. James Wilson, and little social life. He claims that people are cowards and to say what they really mean would risk "mutually assured destruction." House also has nothing but disdain for optimism and sometimes goes to unusually brutal lengths to prove that humans are in essence selfish, predictable liars and that any kind gesture or intent is meaningless.

Parallels with Sherlock Holmes

Series creator David Shore has said that House's character is partly inspired by Sherlock Holmes. The name "House" is a play on "Holmes" (with English pronunciation, a homophone for "homes").

Both Holmes and House are experts who are brought into cases that have proven too difficult for other investigators. Both characters exhibit remarkable powers of observation and deduction, a tendency to come to rapid conclusions after the briefest examination of the circumstances, drug use (cocaine for Holmes, Vicodin for House), talent with a musical instrument (violin for Holmes, piano and guitar for House) and only one real friend (Dr. Watson and Dr. Wilson, respectively), who connects the detached hero to human concerns. Also, just like Watson, at one point Wilson is roommates with House. Watson and Wilson are both attributed to be "ladies' men"; Watson has at least two wives over the course of Holmes' run in literature, while Dr. Wilson has three ex-wives. The two characters also share an unconventional personality and, to an extent, a brusqueness of manner, especially when occupied in an interesting case.

While House uses large quantities of Vicodin for pain management, Holmes used drugs in an experimental, often research driven modality and also took cocaine intravenously when bored; some episodes imply that House at one time also used drugs in this experimental fashion before he developed his current dependency on Vicodin, making references to experiences with LSD, cocaine and marijuana. In the episode "Distractions", House used LSD to treat a self-induced migraine. Another example is when House attempts to obtain experimental surgery to supplement his brain's pleasure center in "Half-Wit".

House's dependency on Vicodin as a substitute to his cases was touched upon at the onset of Season 3. Without the intellectual stimulation of diagnosing patients, House falls into a stark depression, even when his leg is supposedly "cured" and pain free ("No Reason"). He requires either the high of a confirmed diagnosis or Vicodin to function. The similarity between his and Holmes' own addictions (Holmes only required drugs whenever there wasn't a case at hand) is another bridge between them.

The patient in the series' pilot episode is named Rebecca Adler, whereas Holmes is outwitted by Irene Adler in his first short story, "A Scandal in Bohemia." The man who shoots House in the episode "No Reason" has the surname Moriarty, echoing Holmes' nemesis Professor Moriarty. On at least one occasion (at the end of "Human Error"), House's apartment number is revealed to be 221, while his particular apartment is B, a play on Sherlock Holmes' 221B Baker Street address. In the episode "Whac-A-Mole", House challenges his team to a game and places what he says is the right answer in an envelope on which was written "The game is a itchy foot," which is a play on "The game is afoot," a quote often attributed to Holmes (who was in turn quoting Shakespeare (Henry V)).

Character Relationships

Edward Vogler

For five episodes in Season 1, the writers introduced a nemesis for Dr. House in the form of a new hospital chairman and billionaire Edward Vogler (Chi McBride). Vogler was a businessman who donated $100 million in hopes of advancing research into life-threatening diseases. However, as the episodes featuring Vogler advanced, it became clear that the businessman may have had several ulterior motives, including unethically profiting from the hospital's promotion of his drug company. Vogler, acting in his new position as chairman of the board, also declared that he was "going to run Princeton-Plainsboro as a business".

High on his list of expense cuts was Dr. House and his Department of Diagnostic Medicine. The department, as constructed in the show, serves far fewer patients than any other hospital department and appears to function to allow House to take those particular cases that interest him because they are far more complex and difficult to diagnose than any others. In other words, being House's "vanity project" (as Vogler terms it) and brings little money into the hospital aside from the PR generated by House's victories. Vogler offered House a Hobson's choice: fire one of his team members and take on more clinic hours or risk losing the entire department. How this choice plays out was the focus of several episodes. In the end, the hospital board of directors votes Vogler off the board after Vogler effectively forced them to vote to remove Dr. House and Dr. Wilson and threatened to do the same to Dr. Cuddy.

Dr. Allison Cameron

House revealed in the pilot episode that he hired Allison Cameron because she was "pretty" and that a pretty girl who went into medicine shows greater commitment than an ordinary looking student because the former could have used her looks to get an easier job.

A major subplot of the first season dealt with Cameron's growing attraction to House. He took Cameron on an informal date to a monster truck jam in the episode "Sports Medicine." When Edward Vogler pressured him to fire one of his team, she resigned, later to return to her fellowship, on a condition that House take her out on a date.

House has a sexual attraction to Cameron. His hallucination showed Cameron as a "lab rat" to show how safely a surgery could be done using robotics; he uses the robotic surgeon to caress Cameron's body and also intentionally pops off the buttons of her blouse to reveal a very lacy bra and cleavage. During his hallucination, Cameron keeps vigil by House's bedside for the two days he is unconscious showing that he wants Cameron to like him although he is not interested in a relationship.

Stacy Warner

Stacy, House's former girlfriend, maintains that House always had an antisocial personality and that his being crippled was not the reason for his misanthropy. The two reunited in the end of the first season. During the second season, when Mark and Stacy grow apart due to his bitterness over his illness and jealousy of House, House and Stacy grow closer until they have an affair on a business trip. Stacy was ready to leave Mark for House, but he told her to go back to her husband, because he would not be willing to do whatever it would take to sustain a relationship. Devastated, Stacy leaves with her husband and has not been seen on the series since.

Dr. Phillip Weber

House's fellow student at Johns Hopkins who "ratted" on him for cheating in an exam. House exacts his revenge against the doctor who's touting his new treatment for migraine ("Distractions"). House refers to the "snitch" as Dr. von Lieberman, although his real name is revealed to be Weber. When asked about this discrepancy, House says that he calls him von Lieberman because it's "way eviler".

House surreptitiously invites the "snitch" to lecture at his hospital and, at the lecture, heckles him, questioning both his research and competence. Later, his former nemesis is shown storming into House's office with the news that his drug has been withdrawn by the FDA after House contacted that agency via e-mail, complaining about Weber's poor research and ineptitude in mathematics. At one point in this confrontation, House tells Weber, "I know your math skills. They blow!" At the end of the scene, House declares the score settled.

Jack Moriarty

Jack Moriarty (Elias Koteas) is the vengeful individual who shoots House in the Season 2 finale ("No Reason"). His wife was once a patient of House and in the process of finding the cure for her mystery illness, Moriarty revealed to House that he had had an affair. Although the fact that he had an affair was medically irrelevant to his wife's illness, House revealed this information to the wife. Consequently, the wife committed suicide. (How much of this is true is open to debate, for this information is revealed to the audience during House's hallucination).

In the hallucination that results from Moriarty's attack on House, Moriarty is wheeled to the same Intensive Care Unit House is in. Moriarty psychoanalyzes House, though it turns out at the end that this is actually House conversing with his subconscious.

Dr. Lisa Cuddy

Lisa Cuddy is House's boss at the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital and fellow University of Michigan alumna. There is a degree of sexual tension between the two as they had a one night stand in the past. Cuddy seems to have a special relationship with House, in that she is, aside from James Wilson, probably the only person whom House can call an ally. Cuddy also seems to have a strong emotional attachment to House, as well as a level of comfort with him that she does not have with anyone else except Wilson.

She is able to withstand House's many taunts (often about her breasts or being pregnant) while having the wit to retort or laugh him off. Cuddy seems to have almost limitless patience with House and his unconventional methods, though is not afraid to step in when House steps too far out of line. In the midst of Season 3, however, while his Vicodin usage was being controlled by Cuddy, he intentionally hurts her by telling her it was a good thing she hadn't become a mother yet because she "sucks at it."

House seems to have an unusual knowledge of details of Cuddy's personal life, such as where she keeps her spare keys and the timing of her menstrual cycle.

Dr. James Wilson

James Wilson is House's closest friend as he is one of the few who chooses to have a relationship with House. He is one of the few individuals who can make House laugh. He has known House before the infarction, although it is not clear exactly how long ago they met. In the episode "Need to Know", it is revealed that, after House and Stacy split up, Wilson took care of him. Robert Sean Leonard has said that the character was originally intended to play the role of Dr. Watson although he believes that House's team has been playing the role since the beginning of the series.

House and Wilson tend to criticize each others' actions and motives. Although he prescribes House's Vicodin, Wilson frequently attempts to force House to change his habits. This is most notably seen during Season 3 and in the Season 1 episode "Detox," where he tries to make House acknowledge his addiction. Wilson frequently analyzes House's motives, much to House's annoyance, and usually tries to encourage change. On the other hand, House criticizes Wilson's relationships with women, namely his serial philandering, need for neediness and desire to "fix" people. House is quick to assume that any woman that Wilson speaks to is a potential bedfellow and takes obsessive, almost jealous measures to cut off any relationship before it starts.

Despite this, Wilson is remarkably loyal to House and has risked his career to help House when Edward Vogler threatened it in "Babies & Bathwater" and when Michael Tritter targets him to investigate House in Season 3. In a fit of frustration during "Babies and Bathwater", he tells House:

"I’ve got no kids, my marriage sucks; I’ve only got two things that work for me: this job and this stupid, screwed up friendship and neither mattered enough to you to give one lousy speech."

House has quietly admitted, at several instances, that he is grateful for Wilson's presence, either by referring to Wilson as his best friend or, in response to the above quote, saying: "They mattered."

Producer Katie Jacobs has said both characters avoid mature relationships. She added that Wilson's moving into House's apartment after a failed relationship in "Sex Kills" symbolizes his taking emotional refuge in his friend. In "Spin", Wilson confesses that an unnamed "someone" made him feel "funny, good" and that he "didn't want to let that feeling go," therefore sparking his own series of mental affairs and damaging his relationships.

Dr. Eric Foreman

Eric Foreman has a rivalry with House, which began in the first episode, when House admitted that he specifically hired Foreman because of his criminal record (Foreman initially threatened to sue House). House also once called him "Blackpoleon Blackapart", a reference to Napoleon Bonaparte and his take-charge leadership abilities. At the end of Season 3, Foreman believes he is becoming too similar to House as his patient dies and he is forced make difficult medical decisions in the next episode.

Dr. Robert Chase

Robert Chase has betrayed House throughout the series to keep his job, such as when Edward Vogler's reign as the chairman of the hospital threatened his career. Michael Tritter uses this as an advantage when he is investigating House. He made it appear as if Chase is conspiring against House again and House punches him in the jaw. Afterwards, Chase tells Wilson that he will no longer seek House's approval. However, in the next episode, Chase reassures House that he and his jaw are fine and things seem to be back to normal.

While House has said he believes Chase "loves" him, there has been no outward reciprocation or particular attachment on House's part. However, House helps Chase keep his job after he makes a serious error that could lead to his dismissal in "The Mistake". During "Half-Wit", Chase cries as he hugs House as he and the rest of the team believe House is dying of inoperable brain cancer.

House respects Chase's instincts and ability to use logic to figure out what's going on through his powers of observation. House admits this to himself in his dream when he was shot and later on to Chase directly when Chase figures out House canceled Foreman's interview.

Trivia

- House has shown interest in the following television shows: General Hospital, The O.C., SpongeBob SquarePants, The New Yankee Workshop, Monster Truck Jams, 24, The L Word (which he watches muted) and Blackadder (which Hugh Laurie starred in from 1986 to 1989).

- House is fond of playing portable video games, in one episode even attempting to wake a patient by placing the speaker of the Nintendo DS he was playing next to their ear. Laurie has remarked that House's obsession with television, video games and popular music is meant to echo Sherlock Holmes' habit of listening to classical music or reading dull monographs for hours on end in order to relax his mind while pondering a case.

- In the episode "Paternity", it would appear that House played, or at the very least enjoyed, the sport of lacrosse before his infarction. He is seen by the viewer observing a game, coaching the players under his breath. It is soon revealed to the viewer that he is actually in an open field and has been imagining the game or perhaps lingers long after it finishes. He then clutches his cane like a crosse (the proper name for a lacrosse stick) and stares at it longingly. In "Euphoria (Part One)", House is twice shown using his cane in a crosse like fashion, first knocking up a large ball and catching it in the hook of the cane, then later launching the ball against a wall and catching it as one would in a game of lacrosse. He has also been seen watching baseball.

- In "No Reason", his hospital identity band lists his social security number as 295-13-7865.

- Right handed.

- Has an iPod.

- Has worn Nike Shox.

- Rides a Honda CBR1000RR Repsol replica motorcycle.

- Hugh Laurie auditioned for the role of House in a restroom in Namibia. He was rehearsing his role for the film "Flight of the Phoenix" and claimed that the restroom was the only place with enough light.

- Hugh Laurie's own father was a real doctor.

- Hugh Laurie is English, of Scottish descent, despite Dr. House's Northeast-American accent. Laurie's American accent was convincing enough that when House producer/director Bryan Singer (unaware of Laurie's true nationality) saw his audition tape, Singer pointed to him as an example of a compelling American actor.

This article primarily consists of material from the Wikipedia article "Gregory House which is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Dr. Gregory House (played by Hugh Laurie)
Dr. Allison Cameron (played by Jennifer Morrison)
Dr. Eric Foreman (played by Omar Epps)
Dr. James Wilson (played by Robert Sean Leonard)
Dr. Lisa Cuddy (played by Lisa Edelsen)
Dr. Robert Chase (played by Jesse Spencer)

Other Cast and Characters.