How Does Hugh Laurie See Life After 'House'?

Before "House" began its 2011 season on FOX, talk started here and there.

Lisa Edelstein's Dr. Lisa Cuddy would be soon departing, unable to reach a deal with Fox executives for a new contract. It would be like seeing a crucial working part of Dr. Gregory House's heart - without question, his greatest ally and maybe most formidable foil - climb from the narcissistic diagnostician's ribs and walk out the Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital's door without looking back.

It might be a death knell, some speculated.

Fortunately, here we are well into the fall season, and no such thing has been confirmed. But "House" has lived a long life of eight seasons. It's an elder statesman among primetime mainstays. When the time inevitably comes, where and how will it leave its stars?

The man that put the breath of life into House knows: in a word, better. But when "House" ends, the veteran British player told the U.K. Daily Record recently, he's through. He just knows there won't be another "House."

"I think I have been rather spoiled here," he said. "I can't imagine there will be another one quite like this. ... I think I am extremely lucky to have had the one shot that I have had at it and I wouldn't go looking for lightning to strike twice."

It's embarrassing but undeniable: it's easy to forget that a young Laurie cut his teeth as the bumbling, sweetly dimwitted George - first, man-child Prince George in "BlackAdder The Third" and then his equally asinine ancestor Lieutenant George in the World War I-set "Blackadder Goes Forth" - and then again recently in the animated Christmas comedy "Arthur Christmas." He's that rare actor whose talent transcends comedy or drama.

But for as much as he's taken in since beginning his acting career in his native England in 1982, he seems grateful for no experience more than the miles he's limped as House - experience he wants to parlay into a dive into writing and producing after he calls his television acting tenure a day after "House.

"We have done 170-odd shows, that's about 56 feature films worth," he says. "That's a huge amount of experience and that sort of experience gives you a confidence, in a way. I think that I have a confidence that I might not have had."