Britain has lost, but Scotland made its much-loved Giant of Stage and Screen, Robbie Coltrane

Robbie, who has died at the age of seventy-two was born Anthony Robert McMillan in Scotland in the Spring of 1950 and spent the first thirty years of his life there before, in the early 1980s, in order to pursue his career as an actor, he moved to a squat in London. He said : "There was my old mate from Edinburgh, one or two other people, a couple of junkies and a prostitute. It was a funny old life. And underneath we used to have a Jewish Italian deli, so you could have falafel and spaghetti. It was fantastic". 

He played his first role on the London stage in 'Threads' as a 'Performer' at the Hampstead Theatre. He tried some standup and slowly began to pick up acting parts and an early break came in the TV comedy series, 'Are You Being Served?'. By the 1980s he was an established member of the Alternative Comedy Movement, and appeared in 'The Comic Strip Presents', 'The Young Ones' and 'Blackadder'. In 1989 he presented many personae in the 'Robbie Coltrane Special'. By the 90s he was everywhere, but it was in the darkly brilliant TV drama 'Cracker' where he played the criminal psychologist or 'Cracker', Dr Edward, 'Fitz', that he mesmerised the critics. 

Robbie became a global movie star in the comedies, 'Nuns On The Run' in 1990 and 'The Pope Must Die' in 1991 along with his appearance in two consecutive James Bond films as Valentin Zukovsky, a former K.G.B. agent turned Russian mafia kingpin in 'GoldenEye' in 1995 and 'The World Is Not Enough' in 1999. He recalled that during the filming of Ocean’s Twelve in 2004, he found himself sitting at a table with George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. He said : “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?” 

It was, however, his Rubeus Hagrid, the half-giant and half-human, who was the Gamekeeper and Keeper of Keys and Grounds of Hogwarts in all eight Harry Potter films, from 'Philosopher's Stone' in 2001 to 'Deathly Hallows – Part 2' in 2011, that he was most loved and will always be remembered.(link) He said : “I’ve played gangsters and prostitutes, transvestites, murderers, everything you can imagine but it’s the first time I’ve played a man who was thoroughly good and I played it for 10 year -  a character that young people could totally trust in”. And : 

“The legacy of the movies is that my children’s generation will show them to their children. “So you could be watching it in 50 years’ time, easy. I’ll not be here, sadly, but Hagrid will, yes”.

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He was born in Rutherglen in the 800-year-old town on the outskirts of Glasgow in the Spring of 1950 and was brought up with his two sisters in the middle class family of his Scottish Calvinist parents, Jean and Ian. His father was a family GP, so busy in his practice that Robbie later said his father hardly spoke to him until he was six and presumably, not in bed by the time he got home. His mother was a teacher and her love of music, films and literature permeated family life and Robbie said his earliest memory was of lying beneath the piano while his mother played above him. In addition to picking up her interests, he also developed an interest in motor vehicles and lorries in particular and, as a small boy, would run around pretending to be one. A schoolfriend recalled : “He knew all the makes, where they went, everything about them. He had a very enquiring, curious mind”.

In addition to his medical practice, his father also worked as a police surgeon in Glasgow and Robbie recalled that he : “Used to spend all weekend stitching up knife victims”. In his father's library at home, Robbie was familiar with his books on both biology and pathology. When he was eleven, his father wanted him to view some crime victims, believing that we shouldn't cower before death, but his mother intervened to veto the idea Nevertheless, when it came to murder, the pre-teen Robbie was left with a curiosity to know why people did the things they did. 

After spending his early years in local state schools, when he was thirteen in 1963, Robbie was packed off as a boarder to Glenalmond College, the public School for boys in Perthshire founded in 1847. Known as 'The Eton of Scotland', needless to say, it was in line with most public schools at the time and was deeply authoritarian, with commonplace bullying and disciplinary beatings. His unhappy experience led Robbie to later call for all public schools to be abolished and he said that he'd never send his son to one : "Not unless I hate him". 

As a tool for survival, he named himself, 'Fat Rabb' and adopted comedy and natural ebullience when in the company of other boys. As a result, he became very popular and practiced japes like hanging prefects' gowns from the school's clock-tower. He also joined a subcultural group called 'The Curry Boys', with an initiation ceremony which required new entrants to kiss the head of a rotting dead crow. 

When, many years later, he was asked to reflect on his school life he chuckled and said : "Would I like to have spent five years of my life when I was young doing something else? The answer would be "yes". Like a school full of girls, for example? That would have been nice. By the end of term you used to find yourself fancying the cleaners, who were all about 48, with moustaches".

He was drawn to performance on the school stage and was soon dressed in chain mail, with a part in Shakespeare's Henry V. He also loved the cinema and believed himself to have been profoundly changed by Marlon Brando's biker in his 1953 film, 'The Wild One' and was particularly affected by the scene where when asked : "What are you rebelling against?" Brando answered : "What have you got?". (link) Robbie's rebelliousness, no doubt nurtured by the rebellious 1960s, made the school consider his expulsion. 

He told a 'Guardian' interviewer in 2012 that he questioned school rules because they : "Made no sense. What do you mean, you can't walk past a prefect with your fucking jacket undone?" Then imitating the answer in a public school drawl said : "It's just the way it is. It's just the way it's done." He then pulled an expression of disgust and shook his head and said : "Uh-uh". He said he used to think : 'If we were in Sauchiehall Street [in central Glasgow] now, boy, it'd be a very different story. Because I'm a Glaswegian, you know?" 

The decision to expel him was apparently rejected by the staff because they feared the adverse reaction of Robbie's fellow pupils. More likely, it was the fact that by the age of fifteen, he'd grown to his 6' 1", which earned him a place as prop for the school's First XV rugby team and, more prestigiously, tour Canada with the 'Scotland Schoolboy Side'. He was also the prize-winning head of the school's Debating Society.

He and two friends at school were known as 'The Three Pseuds' amongst other boys, who thought them too clever by half. Imitating one of their public school accents he later said he was told by one of them : ""Yah, you're very, very clever, mate, but there's more to life than being clever". Actually, there isn't. But I'm very lucky because I was built like a brick shit-house, as I am now, though much slimmer of course. I did look after myself, I was a big, strong boy, I didn't take any shit from anybody. Unlike some people, who eat an awful lot of shit and I did feel sorry for the weak ones. It's essentially survival of the fittest and I was one of the fittest, so I have no complaints".

The fact that must have already been interested in making his own amateur films at this time, indicated by the fact that his older sister Annie's habit of sending him pictures of the American director Orson Welles, to cheer him up. It was while he was at school and separated from his family, that he also had to deal with coming to terms with his grief after the early death of his father from lung cancer.

His elder sister, Annie was studying graphic art at the Edinburgh College of Art and Robbie would often visit her. He got on with her friends and decided to follow in her footsteps and at the age of eighteen in 1968, gained a place at the College to study for a diploma in art. Here he was teased for sounding public school posh when he spoke and was nicknamed 'Lord Fauntleroy' and as a consequence he quickly repressed the accent. In fact, he soon became known as 'Red Robbie' for his involvement with radical causes and at twenty-one he supported the 1971 campaign by workers to keep the Glasgow shipyards open. He said : “I believe I showed a pornographic movie and charged people five shillings to look at it and gave the money to Upper Clyde shipbuilders”.

At the College he had started acting. Liz Lochhead, the poet, was a fellow student who  saw him in Harold Pinter’s 'The Dumb Waiter' and recalled his performance as : “Fantastic … bloody terrifying”. Robbie himself said : “I threw up every night before going on stage”.

In relation to his progress as an artist he told Scotland's 'The Herald' in 2014 : “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 realized all the things that were in my head were not on the canvas”. “What young man sets out to be mediocre at something?”

Having graduated in 1971, he enrolled for a year's post graduate study at Edinburgh's Moray House College of Education, but abandoned a career in education in favour of another in film. In 1973, at the age of twenty-three, his 50-minute documentary, 'Young Mental Health' was voted 'Film Of The Year' by the Scottish Education Council.

When he was twenty-six in 1976, Robbie's younger sister, Jane, committed suicide while studying at York University. Like Robbie, she was bubbling over with life, but suffered from depression. It was Robbie who travelled down to collect her belongings and on the way home, wild with grief, he smashed up his train carriage.

Jazz lover Robbie, who was to take the name 'Coltrane' from saxophonist John Coltrane, now began to hang out with actors in Glasgow and Edinburgh, performing on the fringes of the Edinburgh Festival, as well as working as a chauffeur, driving directors and stars around. He supported himself with a series of low-paid jobs, throughout the 1970s while working with the San Quentin Theatre Group and the Bush Theatre. It was in Edinburgh's renowned Traverse Theatre, that he formed a working relationship with playwright and director John Byrne and appeared in his 1978 'The Slab Boys'. All the action takes place in the morning and afternoon of a Friday in the winter of 1957 in the Slab Room of Carpet Manufacturers A.F. Stobo & Co. of Paisley, a town near Glasgow with Robbie playing the role of a designer, Jack Hogg, in his twenties.

Robbie also engaged in improvisational nightclub work, as well as the kind of stand-up comedy that had practiced at school. His personality and mastery of accents made him popular with audiences and allowed him to play hundreds of very different parts. Despite his middle-class background Robbie always identified with working-class Glasgow. When interviewed by the Guardian in 2012 he said this self-identification was still in place : "I can walk down the street and the hardest man in Glasgow would say : "All right, big guy?" 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".

By the mid-late 1990s, Robbie had had enough of London and said : “I’m not mobbed. It’s not a question of teenage sluts trying to sit on your face. It’s a matter of people starting to get unpleasant when they’ve had a few drinks”. He had revisited Scotland when he toured in a stage production of Dario Fo’s 'Mistero Buffo' and found himself yearning for the honesty of his birthplace. “You know what they say about Glasgow. If they like you they’ll let you live”.

This was the same actor, who in the wake of Hagrid said : 

“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”.