Stuart Little - Gag Reel, Deleted Scenes and Making it Big documentary - all found on the region 1 Stuart Little Deluxe Edition DVD

Screencaps

Interview on the set

Video clip and screencaps

Interviews with Jonathan Ross, BBC

Hugh, it's lovely to see you again
Thank you very much

And may I congratulate you on your burgeoning career as a movie star.
Oh well now, stop. Don't even start

Like the rest of the world I assumed when you stopped working with Steven [Fry] that you would just fade into obscurity.
Actually I presumed exactly the same thing. I thought "that's it", but in a way I feel like a burden has been lifted from my shoulders, I'm free to explore other avenues.

So "Stuart Little", a film I saw in America where it was number one in the movie charts.
It was. It has been hugely successful, apparently. I wasn't there when it was all happening but...

But it [might] not have worked. There are a lot of factors involved here - one has to believe in a tiny living mouse-like creature, which is adopted by a couple of... surprisingly normal folks.
Why adopted? It's even weirder in the book actually because Mrs Little gives birth to a mouse. Of course you try and do that on film [and] it's... tricky.

And also it would call into doubt your manhood.
I suppose it would. I hadn't thought of that angle.

What's it like working with Geena Davis? I mean... both of you do bring sort of a weird quality to it.
Weird

Strange, you know, because you're not just goody-two-shoe parents, I think you hint at... a dysfunctional thing that would lead you to adopt a mouse in the first place... in a pleasant way.
In a pleasant way, yes. It isn't really explained. We felt [...] it was best to sort of scoot over that. We have a solitary withdrawn son and we want a companion for him. Why we decided to adopt a mouse is still not clear to me, even after all these months.

Great seeing you again. I really like the movie, and as ever you're such a welcome screen presence.
You are kind, you're very kind

And this is not ironic
Excellent.

---

You worked with Jonathan Lipnicki as well, who's a wonderful child actor, doesn't appear to have grown an inch since he appeared in Jerry Maquire several years ago.
That's a camera trick, there is a little trench, he's actually about my height.
(Laughs)

But they dig a trench... I'm not even sure of his age now, as the months have flown by, but he's small but perfectly formed and he's a most delightful boy. He's sweet.

Small but perfectly formed brings me rather neatly to Michael J Fox, who supplied the voice for Stuart Little. Was he on set, did you work with him at all?
We rehearsed with him. He wasn't there when we were shooting, because he's got this big... sitcom, "Spin City", which he was off making. But we had some rehearsal with him, he's a very nice man, and very funny. He did it incredibly well.

---

You obviously have a large role in the movie, but the star of the film is the mouse.
The mouse, and my ankles.(both laugh) My ankles do feature a lot... for which I worked very hard. Very toned. I had an ankle regime which I went through every day.

How is it working with little Stuart, I mean what do you do? Do you have a figure, a model there?
We had a couple of models. We had some little robot ones that kind of went (motions) like that with about 19 people with remote control things, but mostly it's... perhaps I shouldn't really be giving this away. I mean we all want to believe don't we?

Hugh, this is being [read] largely by people over the age of 35.
No, it was a computer that did it all so we were acting to nothing. Which is strangely pleasurable, most of the time. A lot easier than real actors.

And were there times when that reminded you of your good old days with Stephen [Fry]?
Yes. Very, very similar. (both laugh) That's vain but true.

NetLondon.com

Date: 21/07/2000

Stuart Little promises to be a big hit in Britain
Hollywood's new big cheese, Stuart Little, arrives in the UK this week for his cinema debut. Critics are predicting the film will be as big a hit at the British box office as it has been in the US. With more on that and the rest of this week's entertainment news, here's Tara Ogden. Combining computer animation with live action, Stuart Little is the cute story of a talking mouse who learns the true meaning of family, loyalty and friendship when he is adopted by the Littles - a family of humans. The movie mouse roared to the top of the US box office chart over the millennium weekend and is expected to repeat his success in the UK. British comedian, Hugh Laurie who co-stars with Stuart in the film, has been talking about his experience of shooting a Hollywood blockbuster

Hugh Laurie said:
It was great to just go to a big American studio and swank about as if I was Clark Gable. It was a fantasy really, terrific fun. It really was great.

LITTLE MOUSE WHO'S A BIG CHEESE; Stuart takes the Mickey mantle and becomes a new star of the 21st century cinema screens.(Features)

Daily Record (Glasgow, Scotland); 6/13/2000; Fulton, Rick

HE might be only three inches tall, but Stuart Little will be one of the biggest hits at the British box office this summer.

After making a phenomenal pounds 100 million in America, the heroic white mouse is set to have as huge an impact this side of the Atlantic.

The film, released here in July, is the story of a mouse, Stuart - voiced by Michael J Fox - who is adopted by Mr and Mrs Little, played by Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis.

The parents go out wanting to adopt a son - and come back with a mouse.

Stuart moves in with his new family on New York's Fifth Avenue, where Stuart embarks on a series of adventures, based on the classic American children's book by E.B. White.

Along the way he meets a variety of characters, including Snowbell the family cat and the street cats Monty, Smokey and Red

Stuart was created using - what else? - a mouse and is being dubbed the Mickey Mouse of the wired age.

For the first time digital characters, complete with personality, performance and life-like qualities, share the screen with live actors.

All of these elements were combined to make a seamless film, which makes you forget the star is only a series of pixels.

Computer-generated images welded to real-life backgrounds - such as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Disney's Dinosaur - which will be out later this year - are part and parcel of this new leap in film-making. Jar-Jar Binks of Stars Wars was the first fully computer generated star.

Rob Minkoff, the co-director of the Oscar-winning The Lion King, directed Stuart Little, which combines human actors and actresses and live animals with adult voices with ground- breaking visual effects from Sony Pictures Imageworks.

In America, the hype was so huge shops ran out of Stuart Little merchandise in the run-up to last Christmas.

There are already Stuart Little clubs on the Net.

Jason Clark, co-producer of the film, reveals the simple truth of Stuart's birth.He said: "We couldn't find a trained mouse that could wear clothes, walk on two feet and deliver lines - so we had to come up with a way to use technology to tell the story.

"What we did with Stuart Little wouldn't have been possible five years ago.

"The challenge was to use this futuristic digital wizardry to capture the spirit of a classic character that E.B. White created 50 years ago."

Sony Imageworks began creating Stuart three years ago, almost to the day, in July 1997.

Although the final results have moved computer generated movie making on, to the next generation, the first step was using good old- fashioned paper and pen.

Hundreds of sketches were created, which were then made into 3D images to make the computer-generated mouse look realistic and loveable.

Rob Minkoff added: "First you study mice and what they really look like and then you extract from that a kind of caricature which gives personality to the creation.

"We needed to find different ways of exaggerating what seems natural about a mouse, without falling into the trap of being too cute."

Once the artists had created a Stuart Little they all liked, animation supervisor Henry Anderson took charge.

He is a pioneer of digital animation and most people know his work, even if they couldn't recognise Henry if they bumped into him - he's best known for the Coca-Cola polar bears.

Henry based Stuart's actions and reactions on mime artist Bill Irwin, who would look at the script and move and react.

His body movements were then used by Anderson to create the bones of their computer-generated image - the bare, wire-frame lines on the computer which make up the body of Stuart minus features, fur and clothes.

They had a body - but they still had to create Stuart's clothes and fur that moved like the real thing. More than 300,000 hairs were drawn and placed on Stuart's head. Dimples and whiskers were added later.

His clothes also had to move, to stretch and to crinkle as he moved, as it would in a human's body, so the animators learned to sew fabrics. This helped them understand how clothes moved.

Once these obstacles were beaten, the real problems began - bringing such details to life as the reflection of the world in the pupils of his eye.

The animators photographed a silver ball that had a reflection of the set in it. Then that reflection was put into Stuart's eye.

Stuart's hands were also a problem - should they be paws or more like human hands,since Stuart was dealing with doors and handles.

The animators wanted to make Stuart so believable as a character you'd forget he was computer generated and think he was as real as the other actors.

Once he was happy the character was as lifelike as they could possibly get it - the movie makers had to put the computer generated character into the real world - talking with humans and reacting with trained, live animals.

Boone Narr's Animals for Hollywood trained 23 cats of various breeds to portray the eight cats in the film.

The Little's pet cat, Snowbell, voiced by Nathan Lane, was played by five identical white Chinchillas.

Nathan has the best one-liners of the film which are delivered with catty sharpness.

Take his plans for the day: "I've got to watch traffic, stretch, lick myself - which, believe me, could take hours if you do it right."

Stuart may be the star of the show, but Snowbell is the diva.

In all, eight trainers were hidden in various spots on the set to direct the cats in their performances.

All this and Minkoff hadn't even started with the human actors. Production began on the film in the summer of 1998 at Sony Pictures Studio.

Between takes Hugh Laurie, who plays Mr Little, was seen talking to the palm of his hand practising his lines. Even he got into the "Stuart is real" club, commenting on his acting talent.

He joked: "There is something Brando-ish about him - but don't think that hasn't gone to his head.

"The first thing he said to me when I met him was: 'Stay out of my light.'

"He's just aware of his image, as all these big stars are."

When asked if Stuart was sensitive about being three inches tall, Hugh added: "Height jokes were not well received in the first week. He made it pretty clear that anything to do with cheese was not funny.

"We had a couple of good cheese jokes in the script, actually - but they had to go."

The film represents a huge stride forward in the field of digital character creation - but Stuart Little is also a heart- warming tale from another, warmer age of children's storytelling and both children and adults alike will love it.

The mouse may only be three inches tall and made entirely in a computer - but, if you watch this film, you'll agree that size doesn't matter.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Scottish Daily Record & Sunday

Step by Step; Stuart Little: No Small Feat for SPI.

Millimeter; 11/1/1999; Wolff, Ellen

In Columbia Pictures' version of E.B. White's classic book Stuart Little, Director Rob Minkoff has a 3D computer-animated mouse in the title role. The character had to appear fully costumed in nearly 500 shots and had to interact with humans in a live-action world. Making Stuart appear lifelike was an animation and integration challenge for the digital artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks in Culver City, California.

One particularly poignant shot shows actor Geena Davis gently handing Stuart to actor Hugh Laurie. "She tips her hand down, and Stuart slides off," explains visual effects supervisor Jerome Chen. "The close-up of Stuart being transferred from one hand to another was very difficult, mainly because of the match move and shadowing that was required."

The process began on set with Davis and Laurie practicing the move, holding a puppet that provided a sense of weight. "We had Geena cup her hand to give Stuart a place to sit," says Chen. "We also made sure that Hugh moved his hand to the right place." Filmmakers shot a background plate of the actors empty-handed. For lighting reference, they also filmed actors holding chrome, white, and gray balls. The chrome ball showed all the lighting setups and provided an image of the world that would later be reflected in Stuart's eyes. The white ball captured the color of the bounce light, including the flesh tones of the actors' hands, and the gray ball checked the ratio of key-to-fill lighting.

Once the plate photography was scanned into Sony's SGI computers, the process of match moving began. "This match move was important to give the animator the structure that Stuart needed to sit on, so that he'd look like he was sitting in Geena's hand and then shifting his weight to land solidly in Hugh's hand," Chen notes. "We had to build a rough facsimile of the actors' hands in the computer, and we began with tracings on paper to give our modelers a rough idea of the shapes. The modelers then made the real geometry-like cross-sections of the fingers-to put onto the raw plate." Armed with this, plus camera reports detailing where the camera was and what lens was used for the shot, the match movers proceeded frame by frame. The process could not be automated, Chen explains, "because slight adjustments of the actors' hands were so organic that tracking software could not have extracted anything meaningful."

After the match move was signed off on, it was handed off to the animators. The animators used a simple shaded version of a hairless Stuart to determine keyframe poses. Once approved, the shot then went to full motion animation, where animators refined the subtleties of performance using Maya. After that, the shot went into a post-animation phase, which began with cloth simulation.

For this shot, Stuart's clothing-which included a shirt, tie, jacket, pants, and shoes-had to move believably with his body. The process, done in Maya, involved two types of cloth simulation. "The first was a physique pass, which was like a rubber suit tacked onto his body. The other was a real simulation, in which the cloth had wrinkles that moved," Chen explains.

When Stuart's jacket and pants bunched up, Chen ran multiple simulations to fix parts of the costume. "We dealt with cloth simulation as you would a visual effects shot-we simulated it in layers and blended the pieces together using software we wrote," he elaborates. "It was time-consuming, but it was the only way we could keep attacking the cloth until it looked right."

The Sony team also faced the daunting task of lighting a character with roughly 300,000 white hairs on his head. "Our strategy was to have Stuart lit in the same way as the actors, which meant that he almost always had a rim light on him and a good key-to-fill ratio," Chen notes. "We put the rim behind him and outlined his fur so he wouldn't feel plastic. Our lighting artists mapped out where the key and rim lights should be using a lower-resolution head with 40 percent of Stuart's fur-so our rendering times wouldn't be too long. We couldn't do these tests with just the geometry because we needed enough fur to pick up the rim light. But fur, especially white fur, is almost self-illuminating. Every one of those hairs acts like a little bounce card that affects the hairs next to it. So the shadows had to be soft, which increased our render times."

"The lighting controls for the head were so complex," Chen continues. "Stuart had a nose with bump maps and specularity maps for moisture, and his ears have maps which show a little bit of a glow coming through them. We also had 12 different types of environment maps that we could put into Stuart's eyes."

The team had to create convincing shadows to integrate Stuart into the live action. "For this shot, that meant not just the shadows that Stuart cast on the actors' hands but also the shadows he cast on himself and the subtle shadow that his tie cast on his shirt," says Chen. "[Given Stuart's tiny size] the tolerances between these were so tight that it was hard for RenderMan to really give the best possible shadows, so we'd create shadows using animated rotoscoped shapes. Our lighting artists are also our compositing artists, so they knew all the 2D tricks to enhance the 3D."

Chen and his crew rendered individual parts of Stuart separately, so that they could adjust them independently in the composite. They did the final composite in Alias|Wavefront Composer. As painstaking as the entire process was, Chen insists that it was not tedious. "When you're working on something that people haven't seen before, you don't mind the challenges!"

COPYRIGHT 1999 PRIMEDIA Business Magazines & Media Inc. All rights reserved.

National Fatherhood Initiative Announces Inaugural Daddy Award Winners: Two Movies Honored for Best Portrayal of Fatherhood; The Winslow Boy and Stuart Little Win Top Honors.

PR Newswire; 6/14/2000

/ADVANCE FOR RELEASE AT 09:00 A.M. THURSDAY, JUNE 15/

The National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) today announced the winners of the 2000 Daddy Awards, presented to the movies released during 1999 that offered the best portrayal of fatherhood. This is the inaugural year for the annual Daddies.

In the category of Best Portrayal of Fatherhood in a Dramatic Film, the winner is The Winslow Boy. Being honored with a 2000 Daddy are Nigel Hawthorne, actor; David Mamet, writer; and Sarah Green, producer. The film was released by Sony Pictures Classics.

In the category of Best Portrayal of Fatherhood in an Animated or Family Feature, the winner is Stuart Little. Being honored with a 2000 Daddy are Hugh Laurie, actor; M. Night Shyamalan and Greg Brooker, writers; and Douglas Wick, producer. The film was released by Columbia Pictures.

"The Daddy Awards offer an opportunity to focus on the positive impact that the entertainment media can play in helping to promote responsible fatherhood," said NFI president Wade F. Horn, Ph.D. "Our goal in creating the Daddies is to spur other members of the creative arts to consider how they portray fathers and to realize that these portrayals have social implications. At a time when nearly four of every ten children in America go to sleep in a home where their father does not live, it is important for the popular culture to provide inspiring models of involved fathering."

In announcing the 2000 Daddies, Dr. Horn discussed what made these two movies stand out above all other films released during 1999:

"The Winslow Boy, set in 1912 England, is about a young man wrongly expelled from the Naval College at Osbourne and his father's unyielding attempts to clear his name. It is not just the Herculean efforts of the father in this story that earned it a Daddy, though that by itself is certainly compelling. It is also the complete, rounded, and intricate portrayal of a father's love for his son and the important role that fathers play in helping their children negotiate the world around them.

"Stuart Little, inspired by E.B. White's children's story, is about the challenges faced by the Little family as they welcome a new member, an adopted son who happens to be a mouse. Stuart Little gives us a father who is both full of love and guidance for his children, and a rock when crisis strikes. The crisis in this case is the diabolical plotting of a cabal of cats to do away with little Stuart. When all seems lost, it is the father who gives his family both the love and strength to make it to the happy ending."

In addition to The Winslow Boy, the following movies were nominated for Best Portrayal of Fatherhood in a Dramatic Film: Arlington Road, Message in a Bottle, October Sky, and The Other Sister.

In addition to Stuart Little, the following movies were nominated for Best Portrayal of Fatherhood in an Animated or Family Feature: Baby Geniuses, Bicentennial Man, The King and I, and Tarzan.

The 2000 Daddy Awards were selected by an academy of fatherhood experts; the academy was developed from a list of over 2,000 experts nationwide who were invited to nominate films for the 2000 Daddies. While not given specific criteria to guide their voting, academy members were offered five dimensions of fatherhood to consider when making their choices:

* Involvement: To what extent is the father involved with family

activities such as eating dinner together, going to church, attending his children's sporting events, and interacting with his children's school?

* Engagement: To what extent does the father spend direct one-on-onetime with his child?

* Guidance: To what extent is the father a role model for his children and is concerned with their physical, spiritual, mental, and developmental growth?

* Is he is also concerned with the moral and character development of his child?

* Competence: How capable and competent is the father?

* Priority: To what extent does the father place his family and role of father at the top of his priority list and makes sacrifices for his family?

The premier fatherhood renewal organization in the country, NFI is a non- partisan, non-sectarian civic initiative working in every sector and at every level of society to end father absence. NFI's national public service advertising campaign promoting responsible fatherhood has generated radio and television time valued at over $120 million. Through its National Clearinghouse and Resource Center, the NFI also offers a wide range of educational materials and outreach tools to assist local organizations interested in reaching and supporting fathers.

COPYRIGHT 2000 PR Newswire Association, Inc.

Hugh's blues; HOMES TRAVEL MUSIC DVDS GADGETS BOOKS GARDENING FOOD & DRINK.(Review)

The Mirror (London, England); 7/6/2002

Byline: LISA RUSSELL

LOOKING relaxed and chirpy in the bright Los Angeles sunshine, Hugh Laurie is the picture of genial bonhomie.

His last Hollywood film, Stuart Little, made a remarkable pounds 110million in America. Its sequel, to be released in the US later this month, is set to emulate it.

Indeed, life is good.

Yet for many years, Laurie has been dogged by the ghost of depression. He underwent therapy for two years to combat his dark moods and now feels he can joke about his problem. "I mean, who doesn't feel down? I get hungry every now and then, too," he laughs. "It's no big deal, really."

His depression was often triggered by the fear of failure. As his fame and success grew, so, too, did the fear.

Now things are different. Stuart Little was a worldwide hit and he has regular work on the BBC drama Spooks. But he is cautious when assessing how far he has travelled from his darkest moments.

"Well, if life is a rollercoaster ride," he says, "I'm on a very straight bit at the moment. I don't feel those great triumphs and disasters that acutely. But I haven't had that many. I haven't stuck my name on something that's been a horrible failure. But, then again, I'm not Tom Cruise either."

In his darkest days, the 43-year-old comedian-turned-actor was crippled by his illness. Despite his increasingly successful career, he found it hard to even leave his bed. He was, he says, a miserable sod to be around.

And no one suffered more than his wife of 13 years, Jo, a former theatre administrator and his three children, Charlie, 13, Bill, 11, and eight-year-old Rebecca.

"I realised I needed to sort it out, that it wasn't going to go away on its own," Hugh admits, in his clipped, upper-class accent. "I saw a therapist for a while but, then, a lot of people go through that, don't they?

"I don't think I suffered any more than a plumber or a dentist would. In fact, dentists get it worse. They suffer from a very high level of depression."

Appropriately for a man relaxing in the plush Four Seasons Hotel, in the heart of La La Land, he says he had no problem getting help to combat his dark moods. And maybe that's why he can joke about his therapy. "People are more open about seeking help these days," he says. "They recognise the fact that the alternative to having a shrink is that you bore your friends stupid. "So I figured that I might as well give someone 100 bucks an hour to hear my woes. At least someone can make a living out of listening to my tedious problems," he laughs.

THROUGHanalysis, Hugh grew to realise how his humour is his shield. He uses it as defence to stop people getting too near. "I probably use humour to try to avoid getting close to people or evading certain subjects in a funny sort of way," he offers. "Making people laugh is sort of cowardly, it can be an intimate thing, but it also distances you from the person."

Today, Hugh is in high spirits. He is making jokes from the minute he strolls into his suite. Looking more like a school teacher than a film star, 6ft 2in Hugh is decked out in casual navy trousers and starched, powder blue shirt. All that's missing is his tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a pile of exam papers to mark. Best loved for playing cheery, upper-crust, bumbling characters in the hit Blackadder series with Rowan Atkinson and the 80s sketch show A Bit of Fry And Laurie withside-kick Stephen Fry, fans view Hugh as someone they grew up with and know well. Pouring a glass of water, he admits that after 20 years in showbiz, he still doesn't consider himself famous.

The pleasurable thing about being in my position is that the only people who know who I am, like what I do. Tom Cruise is recognisable to a lot of people who hate Tom Cruise - and that's a horrible thing." "It's strange but many people who recognise me don't even know who I am."

Instead, they bizarrely mistake him for actor Kevin Kline. "People are very odd. I know this is about to occur when they start to behave like you're Kevin Kline. "This awful feeling usually comes over me and I decide to go with it. I start saying 'A Fish Called Wanda was a lot of fun to do...' but it makes them happy. Anyway, if I pointedout they were wrong, they'd feel silly, so it's better to just go with it and then, they tell their friends: 'I met Kevin Kline today.' "Everyone's a winner."

Hugh certainly had a winning start in life. He grew up the youngest of four children in a privileged family in Oxford. After attending Eton, Hugh studied at Cambridge... and caught the acting bug. He served as President of Footlights Dramatic Club, which produced comedians such as John Cleese, Peter Cook and Eric Idle. It was there that he teamed up with fellow student Emma Thompson who introduced Hugh to his future comedy partner Fry. "In university, I was just bumming around with nothing else to do.

Then I did a show which won a prize at the Edinburgh Festival and the next thing I know, this guy pullsup in a Rolls-Royce with a big fat cigar and says: 'I'm an agent, do you want to do this for a living?' "So, I thought, well, I'll try it for a month... and 20 years later, I'm still waiting to find a proper job."

Hugh also has other strings to his bow. He's the author of a top novel, The Gun Seller, which will be soon made into a film, as well being an accomplished classical pianist. His next film, Albert Ross, is a romantic comedy starring Denise Van Outen, which Hugh refuses to talk about for fear of jinxing it.

Yet despite the apparent security of so many roles and what seems a relatively trouble-free road to success, Hugh wouldn't encourage his kids to enter showbiz. "They haven't shown any signs and I'm relieved, because it's awkward having two people living under the same roof doing the same thing.I think it can lead to stresses. Instead, I'd love it if my son became a professional cricketer, so I could watch him play all day. "In fact, a casting director asked me if my sons would like to audition for the Harry Potter film. I had this 'Oh God, you know I don't want them to get it' feeling. One of them tried out but he didn't get it. Big relief."

Hugh says his family is the true love of his life. His marriage survived his bleak moments of depression. It also survived his brief affairwith film director Audrey Cooke in 1997. But it was for his family's sake that he sought help for his depression and he's acutely aware of the repercussions his career can have on his youngsters. "It can be tricky for our kids to have a famous-ish dad," he says. "I do think about trying not to embarrass them. "So far, they don't feel too uncomfortable about it but I suppose I could do a really bad film one day... then when they're in the playground, someone might shout: 'Your dad is in that rubbish!' "Hopefully, by that time they'll be able to deal with it, too. But there are perks, they get some goodie bags. They get some baseball caps and T-shirts out of it.

HUGH flew in to California to bang the drum about Stuart Little 2, which is released in the US on July 19. The story continues the adventures of adorable mouse Stuart, who was adopted by the caring Little family

Hugh and actress Geena Davis - in 1999. The sequel again features the voice of Michael J Fox (as Stuart) and, this time, Melanie Griffith (as Margalo the bird). Hugh is chuffed that he's in another Hollywood film, albeit a kids' one. "I still don't know why they chose me," he winces, again displaying his defence mechanism. "I still think it was a typing error and they got the wrong bloke. They probably wanted Hugh Grant..." That's our Hugh, self-deprecating to a fault...

British actor doesn't know why he was hired to be `Stuart's' dad.(Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service)

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service; 7/31/2002; Lee, Luaine

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ He has played the typical upbeat American father, with a lilt in his voice and a smile in his repertoire in "Stuart Little" and the sequel, "Stuart Little 2." But British-born actor Hugh Laurie has no idea why he was hired for the role.

"Before the first movie I just thought it was a typing error. When I arrived at the airport I thought someone was going to go, `Oh, my God, it's the wrong guy! We thought it was the other guy.' I wondered, `Why would they hire an English actor?' To this day I don't know what it is."

Laurie is best known here for his long series, "Jeeves & Wooster," based on the P.G. Wodehouse books in which he co-starred with his former skit partner, Stephen Fry.

"I'd done some small TV stuff," he shrugs. "I did a couple things on `Friends,' and `The Tracey Ullman Show.'"

Geena Davis, who stands 6 feet, plays his wife in both "Stuart Little" films. "The first thing is, they were probably looking for a tall actor," says Laurie. "An awful lot of big Hollywood actors are about that size (he squeezes an inch between his thumb and forefinger). It's cheaper because, if they're that size, the sets can be smaller. I'm 6-2 or something. I can't think of any qualifications at all. I can only see a clerical error that they went with."

As far as Laurie is concerned, he's been a clerical error since he started.

"I sort of wish sometimes I had diplomas on the wall and were qualified to do something else _ surgery of some kind. But I have nothing, not even an acting diploma," he says.

There were, in fact, several times when he wanted to quit this erratic profession. "You go to the edge and there's always something that tugs you back and you think, `Well, give it one more shot.' It's not necessarily career things, I've been lucky and always found stuff to do, but there've been times when I thought, `Am I really cut out for this?' `Is this what I really want to do? Should I go off and become a teacher? That's a valuable thing to do. Or should I try to write "Ulysses" ... but that's been done.'"

Not only has he co-starred in productions like "101 Dalmatians," "Blackadder" and "Sense and Sensibility," Laurie has written a novel, "The Gun Seller," the first in a planned series of six.

"I'm a little behind schedule already," he says. "It's a thriller with jokes. And I made a choice between writing a serious novel _ my attempt at the great novel _ or writing six cheap and cheerful novels. And I went with cheap and cheerful, but I've still got five to go."

Though he claims he's not a perfectionist, Laurie admits he can worry a project to morbidity. "In some areas I'm positively slapdash, slipshod. Then I can find myself obsessing over something and redoing it and redoing it and redoing it. Writing, I do it so much to the point that I've disassembled the thing so many times that I'm unable to reassemble it. I've actually killed projects, my own things. Things were ready to go and I just pull it apart again and go, `Oh, it's broken now.' It's very depressing."

Others suffer from the same dilemma, he says, "It's a case of knowing that that's true for other people. I think there's a great comfort in that _ one good thing about growing up _ is that you see that we're all the same ... it's a fundamentally adolescent feeling to think `It's only me who feels pain. Everyone else is sure of themselves, and comfortable and knows what they're doing. I'm the only one who feels pain.' But, of course, everyone's feeling the same thing. And that's almost the definition of adulthood, the moment you realize that."

Married to a former theater administrator, Laurie has three children, ages 13, 11 and 8. He makes his home in London and hasn't yet defected to the U.S., not physically anyway. Do his fellow Brits accuse him of selling out to American mercantilism? "That does exist, but I don't think one can take that seriously," he says.

"There is among the British acting fraternity, which it isn't, by the way, it's a backstabbing snake pit. But let's pretend it's a fraternity. First of all, there's snobbery about the movies; that they're kind of commercial and then particularly American movies are more so. But I've never held to this.

"Hollywood with all its absurdities _ and it has plenty of those _ Hollywood makes the best movies in the world. It just does. And it's pointless to try and pretend otherwise. We may try to reassure ourselves that Hollywood is Babylon and there are great works of art done elsewhere, and of course, every now and then, there will be a good English film, or good French film or good Romanian film or whatever.

"But basically, in terms of just sheer numbers, Hollywood provides fantastic entertainment and terrific films. This isn't just me toadying to Hollywood because I'm here at the time; I've always thought that. The films I've loved ever since I was a kid, 90 percent of them came from this town."

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