Among the hour-long atmosphere videos with soothing background noise that the video portal YouTube provides for stressed people to switch off – huts in the rain, huts on the beach, huts on the beach in the rain – there are several that sound like “Hagrid’s hut”. supposed to be, the round stone cottage of the half-giant and gamekeeper of Hogwarts. It is night, the crickets are chirping and an owl is calling through the darkness at regular algorithmic intervals. Where Hagrid is, it’s cozy. A bit menacing too, just by the sheer shape of this mountain of a man, the gamekeeper of Hogwarts, whom one went to visit for the first time as a magic school freshman not without fear. But still a place of refuge, of safety. Hagrid was the grumpy, cuddly father figure to Harry – and with him to millions of his fans.
In a statement just a few hours after the news of Robbie Coltrane’s death broke through the world, Daniel Radcliffe confirmed that it was sometimes really so cozy on the set of the Harry Potter films. “My fondest memory,” writes the actor, who played Harry when he was a child, “is how he kept us entertained while we were hanging out for hours in the pouring rain in Hagrid’s while filming ‘The Prisoner of Azkaban.’ hid the cabin. He told jokes and stories to keep the mood low.” Radcliffe says Coltrane is one of the funniest people he’s ever met.
This joke was no accident. Robbie Coltrane has been part of the alternative comedy scene in London since the 1980s, which is also where Emma Thompson came from, with whom he appeared in the series “Tutti Frutti”. Coltrane has acted in comedies such as “Supergrass – Our Man in Scotland Yard” and “Kissing the Pope” and has appeared on comedy and theater stages. He actually wanted to be a painter and studied at the renowned Glasgow School of Art in the late 1970s. But eventually he suspected that his greater talent lay in the performative. It was then that he adopted “Coltrane” as his stage name, in homage to jazz musician John Coltrane. At the same time he became addicted to alcohol, at times he drank a bottle of whiskey a day, his first marriage fell apart, he had to be treated for obesity. In the late 1980s, however, Coltrane’s personal life settled down with his second wife and two children.
Coltrane was a child from better circles and went to a fine boarding school
Robbie Coltrane, who, perhaps because of his origins in the Scottish industrial city of Glasgow, always identified with the certain roughness that can accompany hard work, was actually a child from the better circles. The son of a doctor and a teacher, he was born Anthony Robert McMillan in 1950 in Rutherglen, one of Glasgow’s better suburbs. His parents sent him to boarding school Glenalmond College, the Scottish “Eton”, where the students were still beaten. Robbie became a rebel there. Later, when he was already being called “Red Robbie” because of his left-wing attitudes, he called for the abolition of private schools.
When Joanne K. Rowling first started thinking about casting her book characters, Robbie Coltrane was her dream actor for the grumpy but kindhearted half-giant Hagrid. With his 1.85 meters and massive build, he was already physically perfect for the role. Back then, in the noughties, Coltrane was already very well known in Great Britain – since 1993 he had played the leading role in the TV series “Cracker”, a criminal psychologist who is brilliant at his job but helpless in his private life – a role model not only for the flood of ” “broken” policeman characters that defined the subject of crime in the following decades and still do so today. But it was the role of Hagrid that made Coltrane world famous.
He had previously made a foray into the big franchises of international cinema: in the James Bond films “Golden Eye” and “The World Is Not Enough” he played Valentin Zukowski, a former KGB spy-turned-gangster .
Most notable in the years leading up to his death was his role in National Treasure, a mini-series about a comedian and game show host who loses his job after being accused of raping his daughter’s babysitter many years ago to have. The series first aired in 2016, but Coltrane eerily foreshadowed the scandal surrounding Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein by playing the fat, hobbling old man who doesn’t understand the world anymore.
Less Hagrid was hard to come by, Robbie Coltrane never settled on any type of role, neither the comic nor the menacing. But he accepted the consequences of his role as Hagrid. In an interview with the Guardians he said, “The kids come up to you and say, ‘Would you sign my book?’ with their big eyes. That’s a big responsibility.” Robbie Coltrane died on October 14 in Larbert, Scotland, aged 72.