The actor Robbie Coltrane, who has died aged 72, was regularly described as a big man of the British screen. Journalists said he was heavy on talent yet thin-skinned as an interviewee. He disliked his encounters with the press. But the larger-than-life roles with which he was most associated – the criminal psychologist Fitz, Harry Potter’s half-giant friend Hagrid – demonstrated something else: they were performances of a kind of crumpled vulnerability that was also characteristic of the man.
Coltrane recalled that during the filming of Ocean’s Twelve (2004), he found himself sitting at a table with George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. “These are about the three most successful, most beautiful actors in the world at the moment. And here am I. A fat boy from Rutherglen … What the fuck am I doing here?”
The fat boy from Rutherglen also had a splendidly eviscerating wit, useful for rebuffing questions premised on his girth. Once, he was telling an interviewer how he was trying to raise money for a film about Laurel and Hardy. Who would you play, his interlocutor asked? “I’d be playing the wee one with the funny hair, like yourself,” snapped back Coltrane.
It was easy to confuse the big man with his big roles. In the 1990s ITV crime drama Cracker, scripted by Jimmy McGovern, for which Coltrane won the best actor Bafta three years in succession, he played Dr Eddie “Fitz” Fitzgerald, an obese, alcoholic, foul-mouthed, sarcastic, yet cerebral criminal psychologist. “I drink too much, I smoke too much, I gamble too much. I am too much,” Coltrane’s Fitz shouted in one episode. That self-description seemed to fit actor as much as character. True, smoking and gambling were not Coltrane’s vices, but alcohol was: “Booze is my undoing,” he said once. “I can drink a gallon of beer and not feel the least bit drunk.” And Coltrane was regularly written up as just too much, dominating conversations with anecdotes and funny voices rather than listening.
There could also be too little of the big man. When, for instance, he fulfilled his manifest destiny and played the boozy, libidinous, life force Falstaff in Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film of Henry V, the critics felt short-changed. “Mr Coltrane is not on the screen long enough to create any true idea of Falstaff’s magnificence,” decided the New York Times. “Instead, he simply looks like a woozy Santa Claus.”
He could also erase himself exasperatingly: once in 2012, after disclosing to an interviewer that he was diabetic and had lost four and a half stone in order that a leg operation could proceed, he turned tight-lipped. How did he lose weight? “I just stopped eating for a while.” Seriously, how did he manage it, pursued his interviewer. “No, no, no! I don’t want to talk about this in the press!”
Born Anthony McMillan in Rutherglen, near Glasgow, he changed his name, on becoming an actor, in honour of the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. His mother, Jean Ross, was a pianist and teacher, and his father, Ian, a GP who also worked as a police surgeon. His son recalled that Dr McMillan “used to spend all weekend stitching up knife victims”. Their son attended Glenalmond college, an independent school in Perthshire, often described as Scotland’s equivalent to Eton. “It was a very strict school and I didn’t respond well to discipline.” Indeed, he was nearly expelled for hanging prefects’ gowns from the school clocktower, but also played for the school’s rugby team, captained the debating team and won prizes for his art.
At Glasgow School of Art (1968-72), where the poet Liz Lochhead was a contemporary, he was nicknamed Lord Fauntleroy for the posh accent he quickly repressed. He soon became known as Red Robbie for his involvement with radical causes. In 1971, he supported the campaign by workers to keep the Glasgow shipyards open. “I believe I showed a pornographic movie and charged people five shillings to look at it and gave the money to Upper Clyde shipbuilders.”
To his lasting regret, he never became a painter. In 2014, when invited back to art school to open the Reid Building, Coltrane said: “I wanted to paint like the painters who really moved me, who made me want to weep about humanity. Titian, Rembrandt. But I looked at my diploma show and felt a terrible disappointment when I realised all the things that were in my head were not on the canvas. I felt there was something wrong with my hands. That was a heartbreaking day.”
At art school he had started acting. Lochhead saw him in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter and recalled his performance as “fantastic … bloody terrifying”. His memory was different: “I threw up every night before going on stage.” He went on to study art for another year, at the Moray House College of Education, Edinburgh, and acting became his vocation: “One day, [the renowned Scottish actors] Bill Paterson and Alex Norton came to me and said ‘Are you just going to carry on showing off in pubs, or are you going to take this seriously?’ and they sent me to the Traverse theatre”. His first success was in John Byrne’s trilogy The Slab Boys (1979), about a group of young working-class Scots in the 1960s.
Coltrane came to British TV viewers’ attention in a string of 1980s sketch shows, including A Kick Up the 80s and Laugh? I Nearly Paid My Licence Fee, working alongside Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Ben Elton, Stephen Fry and Rik Mayall. He went on to become a fixture of TV comedy, starring in Blackadder and several films in the Comic Strip Presents series.
He was particularly fine as the butt of Blackadder’s wit as an increasingly apoplectic Dr Samuel Johnson in a 1987 episode. “Here it is, sir. The very cornerstone of English scholarship,” the doctor declared to Blackadder, brandishing the manuscript of his recently completed dictionary. “This book, sir, contains every word in our beloved language.”
“Well, in that case, sir,” retorted Blackadder, “I hope you will not object if I also offer the Doctor my most enthusiastic contrafibularities.”
He was better yet at the difficult task of playing Charles Bronson playing Ken Livingstone in the Comic Strip Presents … GLC: The Carnage Continues (1990). After preventing the Tories from flooding south London to turn it into a yacht club, Coltrane’s Livingstone strives to thwart Margaret Thatcher from beheading the Prince of Wales and taking over the kingdom.
Coltrane’s success had downsides. “I’d been broke for a long time and suddenly I had enough money in the bank not to worry if I could afford to eat out or drink a whole bottle of whisky and suddenly I was famous. It went to my head. It only lasted for 15 years.” His friend the actor John Sessions once said that Coltrane had a “strong self-destructive streak … a deep, driving melancholy”.
In the late 1980s, nearing 40, he met Rhona Gemmell. They had a son and daughter and married in 1999, but split up four years later.
The funny man went straight in 1987, when he starred opposite Thompson in Tutti Frutti, a six-part drama by Byrne about a faded Scots rock’n’roll band called the Majestics, newly fronted by the dead singer’s brother, Danny McGlone (Coltrane), who has a romance with a former classmate, Suzi Kettles (Thompson). Danny proves his fondness for Suzi at one point by taking a drill to the teeth of her estranged husband, a dentist. The performance earned him his first Bafta nomination.
Though his subsequent performances in Cracker (1993-96, plus a 2006 revival episode) won awards and critical plaudits, it was the cheesy British film comedies such as Nuns on the Run (1990) and The Pope Must Die (1991) that made Coltrane a movie star. He also appeared in two James Bond films, GoldenEye (1995) and The World Is Not Enough (1999). In 2000, he came sixth in a UK poll to find the “most famous Scot”, behind the Loch Ness monster, Robbie Burns, Sean Connery, Robert the Bruce and William Wallace.
In 2001, though, Coltrane’s celebrity status went global when he was cast as Hagrid, the half-giant gamekeeper of Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry in the first film adaptation of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, reportedly at Rowling’s insistence. The 6ft 1in actor had to adjust to the novelty of being looked up to by adoring small fans. “Kids come up to you and they go: ‘Would you like to sign my book?’ with those big doe eyes. And it’s a serious responsibility.” In 2006 he was appointed OBE.
Coltrane had a passion for classic cars, which he indulged in two travelogues. For Coltrane in a Cadillac (1993) he drove from Los Angeles to New York in a convertible; in 1997 he drove from London to Glasgow in an open-top Jaguar for Robbie Coltrane’s B-Road Britain.
When, in 2009, Coltrane hung up Hagrid’s beard for the last time, after filming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2, the eighth and final adaptation from Rowling’s books, it was with regret. He went on to star in David Pirie’s well-received cop drama Murderland (2009) and in the last episodes of the US sitcom Frasier.
He memorably captured the years when entertainment crashed into investigations of sexual abuse as the veteran comedian Paul Finchley in the Channel 4 drama series National Treasure, written by Jack Thorne, with Julie Walters as his wife and Andrea Riseborough as his troubled daughter. Times and attitudes had moved on: again there was a crumpled vulnerability as Finchley failed to come to terms with what was happening to him. In 2020, Coltrane appeared in Sky Arts’ Urban Myths series as Orson Welles in Norwich.
He is survived by his son, Spencer, daughter, Alice, and sister, Annie.
• Robbie Coltrane (Anthony Robert McMillan), actor, born 30 March 1950, died 14 October 2022
• This article was amended on 16 October 2022 to correct the names of Coltrane’s contemporaries at Glasgow School of Art and the listing of James Bond films.
