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Hugh Laurie is a guest on this week's episode of The Graham Norton Show. This will be his sixth appearance on Norton's red sofa over the years, and regular viewers will know that he's always a delight. To whet your appetite for his latest visit, which airs this Friday (January 6) at 11pm EST on BBC America, here are some things you may not know about the star of House, Avenue 5, and AMC's The Night Manager.

1. His father was an Olympic gold medalist.

Ran Laurie won the coxless pairs rowing event at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. Hugh followed in his father's footsteps by rowing for Cambridge University in the 1980 edition of the annual Oxford versus Cambridge Boat Race. Hugh could possibly have gone even further in the sport, but he revealed during an interview on Inside the Actors Studio that a bout of glandular fever effectively ended his rowing career before it really took off. 

2. His relationship with his mother was quite difficult.

Patricia Laurie passed away in 1989 – nine years before her husband Ran. As The Guardian reports, Laurie once told GQ magazine: "She had moments of not liking me – quite protracted moments. When I say moments, I use the word broadly, to cover months."

3. He and Emma Thompson were briefly a couple at university.

Happily, they remain good mates to this day. When Thompson interviewed Laurie for Interview in 2008, she recalled what it was like dating him during his rowing years. "You were enormous. You were like a f**king giant," Thompson said. "You trained the entire time and ate six steaks at every sitting, because of all the protein the rowers have to eat."

4. He is best friends with Stephen Fry.

Fry and Laurie also met at Cambridge University, and went on to work together frequently in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, their careers may have taken rather different paths, but they remain firm friends – in fact, Fry is godfather to Laurie's three children.

When Laurie received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2016, Fry was there to support him, and told the BBC touchingly:  "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."

5. He is a published novelist.

Laurie's first (and to date, only) novel came out in 1998. Titled The Gun Seller, it's a spoof of the spy genre that The New York Times Book Review hailed as "genuinely witty and sophisticated." It centers on a former British soldier called Thomas Lang who is offered a huge sum of money to assassinate a rich industrialist, but decides to warn him instead because he's a man of conscience. Is it too late for Laurie to play Thomas Lang in a movie?

6. When he became a spokesmodel for L'Oréal Paris, he did so somewhat reluctantly.

Laurie told The Guardian in 2013 that he accepted the deal so he could use the money to fund charitable projects in Africa. "They sort of ask you to do this thing and you go: 'You're out of your f**king mind, not in a billion years would I consider such a thing,'" he recalled. "Then, as they tell you it's a great deal of money, the thought crosses your mind: 'With that money I could build a school in Senegal.' And then you can't say no."

7. Shooting the Stuart Little movies had a peculiar effect on him.

Laurie shared the screen with an adorable CGI mouse in the hit family films released in 1999 and 2002. During a previous appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Laurie said that though the mouse was imaginary, the line between reality and fiction kind of blurred for him during filming. His old friend Emma Thompson is clearly very amused by this.

8. Starring in House became a real struggle for him.

Laurie became a massive star in the U.S. when he was cast as Dr. Gregory House, an infectious disease specialist whose diagnostic skills are a little sharper than his interpersonal skills. During the show's eight-season run, Laurie is reported to have become one of the highest-paid actors on TV, but the intense schedule proved highly challenging at times.

In 2013, a year after the series finale, he told Radio Times that "the repetition of any routine, day after month after year, can turn into a bit of a nightmare."

"I had some pretty bleak times, dark days when it seemed like there was no escape," Laurie continued. "And having a very Presbyterian work ethic, I was determined never to be late, not to miss a single day's filming. You wouldn't catch me phoning in to say, 'I think I may be coming down with the flu.' But there were times when I'd think, 'If I were just to have an accident on the way to the studio and win a couple of days off to recover, how brilliant would that be?"'

9. He stars in a Kate Bush video.

Laurie has released two successful blues albums: 2011's Let Them Talk and 2013's Didn't It Rain?. However, his first foray into the music industry came many years earlier, in Bush's 1986 video for "Experiment VI." The song is about a secret military plot to create a sound that is so terrifying, it can kill people, and the equally dark video was banned by the BBC's Top of the Pops show. Laurie stars as a scientist alongside U.K. comedy legend Dawn French.

10. Damian Lewis lives in his old house.

Yes, really! Lewis told MR PORTER in 2017 that shortly after moving in, he used the connection to ask Laurie for some career advice: specifically, whether he should sign up for the NBC crime series Life. "I called him and said, ‘I know this is weird, but I have just bought your house and I am sitting in your bedroom,’" Lewis recalled. "I asked for his opinion on this TV show I had just been offered.  He was very diplomatic and encouraging. ‘You should go for it!’, he said. So I did."

Do you have a favorite Hugh Laurie role or moment?