(30 March 1950 – 14 October 2022)
The Scots actor Robbie Coltrane, who has died aged 72 from complications with osteoarthritis, was initially perhaps a reluctant performer. He had studied at the Glasgow School of Art from the late 1960s but eventually realised that he was not as gifted a painter as he would like to have been. Instead he turned to acting which proved to be his forte, even though he was a nervous performer. He carried on studying art at the Moray House College of Education in Edinburgh but the acting eventually took over.
He appeared in many TV comedy shows, before progressing to television drama classics such as Tutti Fruit, Cracker and National Treasure, plus a further slew of British and some US TV comedies. Appearances in films included two Bond movies, Dickens and Shakespeare adaptations, Steven Soderbergh's Oceans 12 and, of course, the Harry Potter franchise, playing the giant-sized Rubeus Hagrid, the Hogwarts gamekeeper, thus immortalising him forever.
Robbie Coltrane was born Anthony Robert McMillan in Rutherglen, South Lanarkshire, to Ian McMillan, a police surgeon, and his wife Jean, a teacher and pianist. He attended Belmont House School and Glenalmond College before going to art school where he began acting. He changed his stage name to Coltrane, after the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. His first acting job was with the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in John Byrne’s The Slab Boys, set in the room of a carpet makers with Coltrane as designer Jack Hogg. Showing a flair for comedy, he joined The Comic Strip Presents team, making several comedy films for television.
His first appearances in feature films were in 1980 in minor roles for Flash Gordon and Death Watch. He had a cameo in Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital and went on to make Peter Yates’ Krull, David Drury’s Defence of the Realm, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio and Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa. For Kenneth Branagh he played Falstaff in Henry V and he had roles in Gavin Millar’s Danny, the Champion of the World, Steven Lisberger’s Slipstream and co-starred with Eric Idle in Nuns on the Run. The two Bond films he graced were GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough.
In 2001 came the start of the Harry Potter franchise which kept Coltrane busy until 2011. After Potter he played Mr Jaggers in Mike Newell’s Great Expectations and was the Doctor in Richard Laxton’s Effie Gray, about John Ruskin’s abortive marriage, with a screenplay by Emma Thompson. It was Coltrane’s last feature film.
His appearance as a suspected rapist in National Treasure, the 2016 Channel 4 series, brought him a Bafta nomination. Other awards include three Baftas for Cracker in his role of a criminal psychologist, Bafta nominations for two of the Harry Potter films, the Evening Standard Peter Sellers Award for Comedy in 1990, and the Outstanding Contribution honour in the Bafta Scotland Awards in 2011. He was bestowed with an OBE in 2006 for his services to drama.
Robbie Coltrane married the actress Rhona Gemmell in 1999 and they have a son Spencer and a daughter Alice. However, they separated in 2003 and later divorced. A Labour Party supporter, Coltrane was an advocate for Scottish Independence and he also worked with Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
MICHAEL DARVELL
