The very different fortunes of Fry and Laurie: How one went to America and became a mega-star honoured by Hollywood, while the other, whose life has been dogged by angst, can only look on in envy

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Modest to a fault, Hugh Laurie said he felt ‘incredibly lucky’ when he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame this week.

Stephen Fry, however, was characteristically gushing as he attended the event, happily basking in his close friend’s glory.

‘While he may not be the first wise and kind star to be set in a paving slab in old Hollywood, I venture to suggest no star was ever wiser or kinder. I can say like Doctor Watson of his friend Holmes, the kindest and wisest friend I ever knew,’ said Fry.

The friends famously started performing together as students at Cambridge before launching themselves as a TV double act that could take on anything from comedy sketches to the greatest creations of P.G. Wodehouse.

But while they’ve remained close their careers have diverged drastically.

Laurie, 57, is a household name in America thanks to his award-winning role in medical drama House and is currently promoting his latest TV series.

As for Fry, 59, he has deserted Britain, where he has polarised opinion like no other celebrity, to have what might be his last crack at breaking Hollywood and getting his own name on that famous pavement.

Hugh Laurie honored with star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, pictured with his old Cambridge friend Stephen Fry, with whom he started his career

The friends (pictured in 1990) famously started performing together as students at Cambridge before launching themselves as a TV double act that could take on anything from comedy sketches to the greatest creations of P.G. Wodehouse

SCHOOLDAYS

FRY: The son of a physicist and inventor, Fry had a troubled adolescence. He was expelled from two private schools, one of them Uppingham, where he committed a series of misdemeanours which culminated in bunking off to London where he binge-watched X-rated films in a cinema.

While studying for his A-levels, he spent three months behind bars on remand after stealing a family friend’s credit card.

LAURIE: Born to strict Scottish Presbyterian parents. Laurie’s father, an Oxford GP, was an Olympic rowing gold medallist and, at Eton, son Hugh followed family traditions.

CAMBRIDGE

FRY: Winning a scholarship to Queens’ College, he showed off his intellect on the TV quiz show University Challenge. He joined the university’s drama society, Cambridge Footlights, where he was introduced to Laurie by Emma Thompson, Laurie’s then girlfriend.

Their TV career kicked off in 1982 when the Footlights review won the inaugural Perrier comedy award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and was later broadcast on TV.

LAURIE: He rowed for Cambridge and was tipped for the British Olympic squad before illness forced him to turn to acting instead. Thompson described him as ‘lugubriously sexy’ but, even in Footlights, he was playing second fiddle to Fry.

THE COMEDY DUO

FRY: His first BBC comedy series with Laurie and Thompson, a 1983 spoof science programme called The Crystal Cube, was scrapped after one episode. But the Beeb gave the men a second chance with A Bit Of Fry & Laurie, a popular sketch show that ran between 1986 and 1995.

The same period saw Fry star in the long-running BBC comedy Blackadder, in which Laurie also appeared. They reunited in Jeeves And Wooster on ITV, between 1990 and 1993. This was Fry’s TV golden age — but for Laurie the best was still to come.

LAURIE: Typecast as the amiable but twittish toff to Fry’s more knowing characters, Laurie was far more anxious than Fry to break into serious roles. In 1985, he starred in ITV’s Letters From A Bomber Pilot, a dramatisation of the letters home of an RAF pilot killed in action in 1943.

Laurie and Fry as Jeeves and Wooster on ITV in 1990

SEPARATE WAYS

FRY: In 1995, Fry’s career took a nosedive when he walked out on West End play Cell Mates (about the spy George Blake), secretly fleeing to Belgium. He blamed stage fright but sceptics claimed he had bailed out in a fit of pique after poor reviews. Without him, the play folded. Fry later said that he had been so depressed he had considered killing himself.

Next, he played a small-town solicitor in the ITV Sunday night drama series Kingdom, where he was criticised for ‘playing Stephen Fry’. But the BBC clasped the reliably Left-wing Fry to its bosom, commissioning him to make an endless string of factual shows on both TV and radio.

On television, they included a series about manic depression (from which he suffers), another about homosexuality and a six-part travel series about the U.S. In 2007, the BBC even made a TV programme to celebrate Fry’s 50th birthday. This February, he stepped down from hosting QI, the comedy panel quiz show, after 13 years.

Laurie became an international star with US medical drama House, in which he takes the starring role

LAURIE: In the same year as Fry went AWOL from the West End, Laurie was burnishing his credentials as a serious actor in Sense And Sensibility, the acclaimed adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel starring Emma Thompson.

In 2004, Laurie got the acting job that would change his life in House, a new U.S. drama series. The main role of Dr Gregory House was written for an American, but Laurie had just the right British cynicism to play a misanthropic medic.

And his U.S. accent was so convincing that the director of the pilot episode praised this ‘obscure American actor’. The show — which ran from 2004 to 2012 — became a huge hit, earning Laurie two Golden Globes and, by the end, an eye-watering $700,000 (£483,000) an episode.

HOLLYWOOD

FRY; Has been dipping his toe into Hollywood since the mid-Eighties without scoring a break-out role. He came closest playing Oscar Wilde in the 1997 film Wilde, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe.

Otherwise he tends to be cast as conceited, oleaginous characters. He was the voice of the Cheshire Cat in Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland and the weaselly Master of Laketown in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit.

In 2013, he made a pilot episode of a TV comedy, SuperClyde, about an aspiring superhero. CBS dropped it after a single episode, but announced last year it would give it a second try — without Fry.

LAURIE: His film roles have shown a versatility that is somewhat lacking from his best friend’s, including action flick The Man In The Iron Mask, Disney’s live-action version of 101 Dalmatians, sci-fi fantasy Tomorrowland and the comedy Maybe Baby.

His biggest movie success was playing Frederick Little, the father of the mouse hero of the Stuart Little films. His accolade on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame comes five years after Guinness World Records listed Laurie as the most watched lead man on television.

Back in the UK, his portrayal of villainous arms dealer Richard Roper in the gripping BBC thriller The Night Manager in March was yet another triumph.

Laurie and Fry in one of their first BBC ventures, A Little Bit Of Fry and Laurie

HOME FRONT

FRY: After struggling to hide his homosexuality at school, he claimed he spent his adult life from 1979 to 1995 celibate. But he was ‘saved’ from depression and his celibacy by Daniel Cohen, a make-up salesman 12 years younger than him.

They lived together for 15 years until Fry, then 52, dumped him for a 26-year-old actor, Steven Webb. Within three years, Fry had moved on from Webb as well.

He married Elliot Spencer, 30 years his junior, at a secret ceremony in Norfolk in January 2015, after they met at a house party. On their first anniversary, Fry gushed on Twitter that he was ‘still deliriously happy!’

‘As long as I’ve got my hair dryer with me, we don’t argue,’ Spencer, 28, says of life with a man the same age as his father.

Fry hosted multiple series of QI (pictured), a comedy quiz show that asks questions about myths that most people take to be true 

LAURIE: Married his girlfriend Jo Green, a theatre administrator, in 1989 and they have three children: Bill, Rebecca and Charlie.

In 1997, they survived revelations of Laurie’s affair with film director Audrey Cooke on the set of children’s adventure film The Place Of Lions and remain together, sharing the family home in Belsize Park, North London.

Due to his work, Laurie spends most of his time at his Los Angeles home while his wife and children remain in the UK. He, too, has suffered from depression — ‘I get anxious about everything’ — although, unlike Fry, he is reluctant to talk about it.

Laurie has acknowledged how tactless it is for a millionaire celebrity to be complaining about his lot.

VICES

FRY: In 2014, in his autobiography, More Fool Me, Fry boasted of the unlikely places where he had taken cocaine, including Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons and Windsor Castle. After first taking the Class A drug in 1986, he wasted ‘tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as many hours’ snorting it.

LAURIE: The raciest revelation has been that he admitted experimenting with Vicodin, a painkiller — for the purposes of research, as his character on House took it for leg pain.

IN THE LIMELIGHT

FRY: For all his griping about media intrusion, Fry revels in public attention, keeping himself in the headlines with sensational revelations about his private life and by sounding off about the latest bien pensant cause.

In 2008, he opposed celebrating Israel’s 60th birthday. The following year, he was widely condemned for comparing Polish conservatives to the Nazis after the former announced an alliance with the Tories.

Attacking Poland’s history of ‘Right-wing Catholicism’, Fry called it ‘deeply disturbing for those of us who . . . remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on’ (the concentration camp was built by the Nazis in occupied Poland). He later issued a grovelling apology.

He has a history of deeply distasteful misogynistic remarks, announcing that women don’t really like sex, for if they did, they would ‘go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush’.

The pair in Alfresco, a sketch show starring Ben Elton, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson and Siobhan Redmond.

Hosting the Bafta awards this February, he kept up his tradition of lewd remarks, leching over Eddie Redmayne as a trangender woman in the film The Danish Girl. ‘He has been a man trapped in his own body, a woman trapped in a man’s body and, if I had my way, a man trapped in my basement,’ he said.

The same ceremony saw him flounce off Twitter (for the third time) after Fry called acclaimed costume designer Jenny Beavan a ‘bag lady’. As Twitter exploded in fury, Fry responded: ‘Will all you sanctimonious f****** f*** the f*** off.’

A few months later, Fry launched an extraordinary attack on victims of sexual abuse, telling them to ‘grow up’ because self-pity is the ‘ugliest emotion in humanity’. This from a man who has wallowed in self-pity throughout his life.

Amid the subsequent outcry, the mental health charity Mind, of which Fry is president, said it would be speaking to him to discuss its supporters’ concerns.

LAURIE: Like Fry, Laurie’s a long-time Labour supporter, but he is infinitely more reluctant to foist his views on others.

If Fry’s public utterances have long amounted to what one critic called an ‘orgy of self-pity and weird words plucked from the pages of obscure novels’, Laurie is almost painfully reticent. He has cited the Scottish Presbyterian values he inherited from his parents, who taught him to despise boastfulness and feel guilty about success.

When House turned him into a sex symbol, Laurie dismissed this new image as ‘pish and tosh’.

WHAT NEXT?

FRY; Together with his young husband, he has bought a $1.8 million home in the Hollywood Hills, a base for another attempt at U.S. television success.

He has a part in a CBS comedy series, The Great Indoors, playing the founder of a travel magazine.

He also plays a character called Cuddly Dick, described as a ‘mysterious elder’, in the latest season of Sky’s surreal fantasy comedy Yonderland.

LAURIE: Fry’s new U.S. show will have to impress bosses at the CBS network if it is ever to get beyond the first season, a task looking all the more unlikely given poor reviews from the critics. But Laurie has already had two seasons of a show commissioned in advance — a drama series called Chance in which he plays a forensic neuro-psychiatrist drawn into a murky world of mistaken identity and police corruption in San Francisco.