Created by David Shore and portrayed by English actor Hugh Laurie, he leads a team of diagnosticians and is the Head of Diagnostic Medicine at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in Princeton, New Jersey.

In the series, the character's unorthodox diagnostic approaches, radical therapeutic motives, and stalwart rationality have resulted in much conflict between him and his colleagues.

[3][4] A portion of the show's plot centers on House's habitual use of Vicodin to manage pain stemming from leg infarction involving his quadriceps muscle some years earlier, an injury that forces him to walk with a cane.

[11] House presumably picked up his affinity with languages during this period and shows a level of understanding of Chinese, Greek,[12] Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi, and Yiddish.

House loves his mother but hates his father, who he claims has an "insane moral compass", and deliberately attempts to avoid both parents.

[11] At one point (episode "One Day, One Room"), House tells a story of his parents leaving him with his grandmother, whose punishments constituted abuse.

[17] After a second DNA test was performed in the episode "Love is Blind", House discovers that the man he assumed to be his biological father, Thomas Bell, was not either.

[20] While appealing his expulsion, he studied at the University of Michigan Medical School and worked at a bookstore, where he met his future employer and love interest Lisa Cuddy,[21] with whom he shared a night where "he gave her everything she asked for.

Wilson, who was going through his first divorce at the time,[17] broke a mirror in frustration, and started a bar fight after a man repeatedly played "Leave a Tender Moment Alone" on a jukebox.

[17] Out of sheer boredom with the convention and to "have somebody to drink with", House paid for the damage, bailed him out, and hired an attorney to clear Wilson's name (which he failed to do), starting their professional and personal relationship.

Near the end of season seven, House finds out the experimental drug he had been using caused fatal cancerous tumors in all of the lab rats in the experiment.

The final season's opening episode partly explores what path an imprisoned House would take aside from practicing medicine, revealing physics as his other forte.

[19] The episode "Body & Soul" makes a nod to this with a reference to a particle physics text amongst his books, as mentioned by his then-wife Dominika Petrova.

[31] House fakes his own death in the series finale, thus giving up his ability to practice medicine, in order to spend time with Wilson, who has five months to live.

[41] Laurie describes House as a character who refuses to "obey the usual pieties of modern life" and expects to find a rare diagnosis when he is treating his patient.

[53] He regularly engages the services of prostitutes,[20][54] of which his former female diagnostic team member Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), who once had a crush on him, is aware.

House has often credited guitarist/songwriter Eric Clapton and composer Giacomo Puccini as his biggest musical influences, drawing parallels to those of Hugh Laurie's.

He is also (as is Laurie) a motorcyclist, riding a Honda CBR1000RR Repsol Edition, license plate Y91, as seen in "Swan Song", "Help Me", "Deception" and "Post Mortem"; otherwise, he drives a Dodge Dynasty sedan.

[65] House shows an almost constant disregard for his own appearance, possessing a permanent stubble and dressing informally in worn jeans, wrinkled shirts over rumpled T-shirts, and sneakers.

[17] In the series finale, House fakes his death both to get out of going to prison and to spend five remaining months with Wilson before he dies of cancer, after having spent the past third of the season helping him through difficult, risky and ultimately unsuccessful treatments and reckless "bucket list" wishes.

The House-Cuddy story culminates in the season 6 finale, "Help Me", when Cuddy cancels her engagement to Lucas to face the realization that she has loved House all along;[72] they share a passionate kiss, hinting at a mutual willingness to try to develop a real relationship.

While the show was originally set to be a medical procedural, the idea changed when the writers started to explore the possibilities of a curmudgeonly title character.

[76] Shore also based the character partly on himself: in a 2006 interview with Maclean's he explained that he has a "cynical and cold attitude lurking within" him, and almost always agrees with House's point of view.

[77] The initial idea was for House to use a wheelchair, inspired by the 1960s police drama Ironside, but Fox turned down this interpretation (for which the crew was later grateful).

[79] It was Laurie's idea to have the character wear sneakers, because he thought "a man with a cane needs functional shoes"; the Fox studios' wardrobe department kept thirty-seven pairs of Nike Shox on hand.

[66] He put together an audition tape of his own in a Namibian hotel bathroom, the only place with enough light,[85] while his Flight of the Phoenix co-stars Jacob Vargas and Scott Michael Campbell held the camera.

[87][88] After he had watched casting tapes for the pilot episode, Bryan Singer grew frustrated and refused to consider any more British actors because of their flawed American accents.

[74] More famous (in the American market) actors such as Denis Leary, Rob Morrow and Patrick Dempsey were also considered, but Singer, Shore, and executive producers Paul Attanasio and Katie Jacobs all thought Laurie was the best option and decided to cast him for the part.

[85] While Laurie has used an American accent before in the Stuart Little films, he found it difficult to adopt it for his role, saying that words such as "coronary artery" are particularly tricky to pronounce.

The pun does not extend to the meaning of the names, as the surname "Holmes" actually denotes that its initial bearers lived near or worked with holly or holm-oak trees, such that "Holl[e]y" or "Oak[e]s" would be a more literal equivalent.