Little Laurie at large

I was a ridiculous choice for the role," says Hugh Laurie. "When I arrived at the airport I was convinced that their faces were going to drop: 'Oh, no! We were expecting that other guy'. One thing I do have in my favour, though, is that I'm quite tall ... and still am. Not many American actors are; a lot of their major stars are quite small, though they have huge heads. They look like tadpoles. I think they're grown under glass somewhere."

Hugh Laurie folds his own 6ft 2in frame on to a sofa. Instead of performing his designated task - to hype his new movie - he'd much prefer to boggle, mock-glumly, at his own success, then riff on the notion, embellishing it brilliantly. It's his compulsive self-disparagement that's one of life's great mysteries.

This summer finds him in two very different roles. He played his first romantic lead in Maybe Baby, Ben Elton's comedy about infertility, and now there's Stuart Little, a children's film, which was one of the biggest hits last Christmas in America and which opens here this month.

"It's all about the animation: the mouse is the main event," its star demurs. "I'm just a pair of shoes, really. Maybe that's why I was chosen - because I have a particularly well-turned ankle." He and Geena Davis play an eccentric patrician couple who live in Manhattan but seem to inhabit a little time-warp all their own. Laurie asks you, successfully, to believe that he's the sort of chap who will go out to adopt a boy and come home instead with a mouse: a smart-aleck mouse with a sports jacket and the voice of Michael J Fox. Stuart Little is based on an American children's novel by EB White, who also wrote Charlotte's Web: "It's their Winnie-the-Pooh," says Laurie. "Though I'd never heard of it before."

Most people have now heard of Laurie. Not so, he insists. "When you get to a certain level of exposure, you suddenly get noticed by people who don't like you. You've done enough to get into their head, and so they shout things at you in the street. Ben [Elton] is constantly having to deal with that. But it never happens to me. If people go, 'Oh, you're that bloke,' it's usually because they've liked me in something."

That anonymity must be changing fast. Laurie will soon be seen in yet another film, The Girl from Rio, and he is a front runner to play Arthur Dent in the planned movie of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which Douglas Adams is currently working on. "Oh, blimey," he agonises. "Do I have security clearance to talk about this? But I do know that Douglas is very enthusiastic about the chance of pulling it off."

His own second novel, Paper Soldier, is in the works. He's also turning his debut book, the spoof thriller The Gun Seller, into a screenplay for John Malkovich's production company.

On the personal front, he has weathered a crisis in his marriage, precipitated by a well-documented affair with film director Audrey Cooke. On this, and the matter of his long-term psychotherapy, he remains silent. "My therapist would say, 'Why do you always feel you need to please people? Just don't answer!'" So is he feeling bullish? "I always used to think the world was run like a school sports day and if you performed well, there would be a man with a clipboard saying, 'Laurie, well done!' Of course, it doesn't work like that. There's a huge amount of fluke and chance and accident. I believe that nobody actually has a career. You meet someone in a pub or at a party, and just sort of blunder from one thing to the next.

"So I do get anxious because I'm so conscious of it all being, as the Americans say, a crap shoot. I don't feel things are working out according to plan because I don't have a plan. Though I do hope that one day I will be the pianist in a cocktail bar. Every now and then someone will buy me a drink and I'll nod to them and play Autumn Leaves. That's an absolutely wonderful thing to be aiming for."