It is strange to recall that Robbie Coltrane, who has died at the age of 72, was, in his first surge of fame, classed as part of the then rising — often maligned — wave of “alternative comedy”.
Working alongside the likes of Dawn French, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer and Jennifer Saunders, he was a member of the seminal The Comic Strip Presents … team that, in the 1980s, delivered such classic parodies as The Strike and Five go Mad in Dorset. During the same period, he bounced off Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in the sketch show Alfresco.
Coltrane was destined to flex his muscles in other directions. He got his first Bafta nomination for John Byrne’s superb musical drama Tutti Frutti from 1987. But it was as criminal psychologist Dr Edward “Fitz” Fitzgerald in Cracker, a searing, brilliantly written crime series for ITV first screened in 1993, that he really established his dramatic credentials.
After a move to London — initially living in a squat, as was then the way — he fell in with the Comic Strip crowd. His charisma was apparent from the start
Coltrane won three consecutive Baftas for a role now rated among the greatest in British TV history. Over the following decades, he became an invaluable character performer and, as the new century dawned, like so many of his colleagues, he answered the Harry Potter call. His mountainous, oddly sweet Hagrid was a vital part of the saga.
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Hugely and unmistakably Scottish, Anthony Robert McMillan — his stage name was a tribute to the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane — was born into a middle-class family from Rutherglen near Glasgow.
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Mum was a nurse. Dad was a doctor. It seems that, from an early age, he was in rebellion against the establishment. In 2012, he told the Guardian that he always identified with the working class. “I can walk down the street and the hardest man in Glasgow would say, ‘All right, big guy?’” he said.
“I mean, I have respect — I’ve done something with my life, and people in Glasgow respect that, because Glaswegians, they’re like Liverpudlians, there’s a rough edge to them, and they respect hard work.”
After school, he studied for a while at Glasgow School of Art, but soon realised that he did not belong behind an easel. “It was a horrible feeling. The ideas were not there on the canvas at all,” he said.
He moved on to the University of Edinburgh before edging gently towards the stage. Coltrane was in the first production of John Byrne’s The Slab Boys at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh.
After a move to London — initially living in a squat, as was then the way — he fell in with the Comic Strip crowd. His charisma was apparent from the start. A big man with a face that always seemed on the point of jerking aggressively towards the most irritating character in any scene, Coltrane was at the corners of such key British films as Defence of the Realm, Absolute Beginners and Mona Lisa.
It was, however, Cracker that saw him move to the next level. Fitz was, in many ways, an archetype of the damaged detective (even if he wasn’t strictly a copper). He drank too much. He smoked too many cigs. He drove colleagues and family mad. The photo of Samuel Beckett on his wall both confirmed his intellect and pointed to a nihilistic tendency. Written by Jimmy McGovern, the show was singular in its melding of tension with nuanced characterisation.
The actor himself became somewhat too fond of the bottle. “Booze is my undoing. I can drink a gallon of beer and not feel the least bit drunk,” he said. It seems as if a degree of order reasserted itself when, as he approached 40, he met Rhona Gemmell, with whom he would have two children. They retreated to Loch Lomond and eventually married in 1999 — divorcing four years later. “You can’t live the life of an existential hero and be a good father,” he remarked of his shift into domesticity.
There was always a tension within Coltrane’s best work. He was capable of radiating enormous warmth, but, in so many of his best roles, an element of threat forever wafted in the background. That conflict was still at work in his performance as Hagrid, gamekeeper and keeper of the keys, in the Harry Potter series. For all his generosity of spirit, the character was not a giant to be casually crossed. More than a few of this weekend’s obituaries will mourn the “death of Hagrid”. There are worse ways to be remembered.
