Robbie Coltrane, whose appearing profession spanned every thing from Bond movies to Cracker to Harry Potter, has died aged 72.
The information was confirmed by his agent on Friday.
Born Anthony Robert McMillan within the affluent Glaswegian suburb of Rutherglen, Coltrane was educated at Glenalmond College, an impartial boarding faculty whose corporal punishment he described as “legalised violence”, earlier than going to the Glasgow School of Art. He had second ideas about his means as a painter, and switched to dwell efficiency, appearing in radical theatre corporations (together with a troupe from San Quentin State jail) and doing standup, taking the pseudonym Coltrane as homage to celebrated jazz musician John Coltrane.
His first display credit score was Waterloo Sunset, the Richard Eyre-directed Play for Today in 1979, wherein he performed reverse Queenie Watts’s care-home escapee. Thereafter, he had small appearances in movies and TV reveals, together with Flash Gordon, Are You Being Served?, Krull and Britannia Hospital, his distinctive look and sheer measurement serving to him stand out from the gang. Coltrane’s comedy expertise started to take priority, as he discovered success within the early Eighties in TV sketch reveals resembling Alfresco and A Kick Up the Eighties. These positioned him firmly within the faculty of 80s various comedy alongside Ben Elton, Emma Thompson and Rik Mayall – an identification strengthened by his common participation in Comic Strip Presents movies together with such key entries as Five Go Mad in Dorset, The Beat Generation and The Bullshitters.
Related: Robbie Coltrane: ‘I take no nonsense’
However, Coltrane’s talents as an actor had been more and more in proof, and he had appreciable success in 1987 with Tutti Frutti, the John Byrne-scripted, Bafta-winning TV collection a couple of washed-up Scottish rock’n’roll band. Coltrane discovered himself more and more wanted for greater roles in higher-profile initiatives, from Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (wherein he performed a cardinal) to Falstaff in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. However, it was two religious-themed comedy movies – Nuns on the Run and The Pope Must Die – that propelled Coltrane to leading-man standing, and put him on the map within the US.
Coltrane’s raised standing was confirmed by his casting because the prison psychologist “Fitz” Fitzgerald in Jimmy McGovern’s TV collection Cracker, which first aired in 1993. A defiantly non-comic function, Fitzgerald was a groundbreaking creation: good at his job however a multitude in his private life. Coltrane gained one of the best TV actor Bafta in 1994, 1995 and 1996 for the function. Fitzgerald’s addictive life-style additionally mirrored the actor’s: Coltrane admitted to being a heavy drinker within the Eighties, and remained famously combative, as soon as threatening to beat up Piers Morgan in a London restaurant. He then discovered himself forged in two Bond movies, GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough, as morally ambiguous KGB agent Valentin Dmitrovich Zukovsky.
Coltrane settled right into a mid-period profession of alternating roles in plush Hollywood productions (Message in a Bottle, From Hell, Ocean’s Twelve) with easygoing TV appearances (Alice in Wonderland, The Gruffalo). He additionally indulged his curiosity in classic vehicles within the 1997 collection Coltrane’s Planes and Automobiles. However, he discovered himself on the high of the record for the casting of Hogwarts’ faculty caretaker Rubeus Hagrid within the movie adaptation of JK (*72*)’s Harry Potter collection. The first within the collection, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was launched in 2001, and gained Coltrane a brand new viewers of youthful followers, and helped re-energise his profession, significantly on British TV. In 2009, he performed investigating detective DI Hain in David Pirie’s Murderland, and his efficiency as a TV star accused of sexual abuse within the 2016 Channel 4 present National Treasure was greeted with acclaim.
Coltrane married the sculptor Rhona Gemmell in 1999, however they separated in 2003. They had two kids.
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