Robbie Coltrane: a totally singular talent from Cracker to Harry Potter – cerebral, physical and unforgettable
“You’re a wizard, Harry!”
For an entire generation all over the world, this was the key moment – and he was the booming and bearded archangel of destiny: intimidating, scary, and sort of cuddly. For those who turned 11 around the time they saw Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (maybe they’d read the book already), he was the wish-fulfilment messenger bearing news about their secret specialness. This giant of a man appeared like a new kind of Goliath, a Goliath who was on David’s side … and wanted to help David learn how to use that sling of his.
Rubeus Hagrid was the gamekeeper and keeper of grounds and keys at the legendary wizarding school Hogwarts created by JK Rowling, and he was the person who had the honour of telling 11-year-old Harry about his own wizarding identity in that unforgettable scene. Hagrid was played with enormous richness and warmth by Robbie Coltrane, then 51, part of that supergroup generation of character actors who attained global recognition by appearing in the Harry Potter movies. Coltrane’s piercing yet kindly stare, mighty physical frame and richly imperious voice were etched in the minds of young audiences all over the world.
The parents of Harry Potter fans associated Coltrane with another legendary pop-culture figure: the dark wizard of police work, troubled yet brilliant criminal psychologist Eddie “Fitz” Fitzgerald, in Jimmy McGovern’s TV drama Cracker. In that incarnation, Robbie Coltrane was the selfdestructive wild man of forensic psychology, whose fierce sorcery illuminated the criminal’s twisted mind and his own. It was this show, and Coltrane’s own physically formidable performance, which made crime the benchmark of classy TV drama and spawned a thousand moody, damaged, addiction-prone maverick cops. Very few of them were in Coltrane’s class.
But it was Harry Potter who put Coltrane in the premier league of pop culture in the 21st century: his image was one of the most recognisable in the merchandising, like Gandalf’s forgotten younger stepbrother. He was there to help with everything, things such as Hippogriff management, a character who could be inserted into the very plot mechanism and became a vital intermediary between Hogwarts’ young heroes and the teachers – and also between them and the villains and various supernatural creatures. Coltrane was part of the fabric, and in terms of screen presence, he matched Alan Rickman’s Snape or Ralph Fiennes’s Voldemort.
He could and maybe should have been one of the great Bond villains – a little slimmer and this handsome and charismatic man would have been a tremendous 007 himself in the Connery mould – but he played a minor wrongdoer in the Brosnan Bonds, Goldeneye (1995) and The World Is Not Enough (1999). He was Valentin Zukovsky,
a former KGB man and Russian gangster, in an era when this modern association was becoming a fictional commonplace. Coltrane was sleek in the role, worldly and cynical, a man whose impassive expression twitches marginally as he hears the click of Bond’s gun pointed to the back of his head, and he murmurs: “Walther PPK, 7.65 millimetre, only three men I know use such a gun. I believe I killed two of them.” He does a vaguely Russian accent, but the Coltrane voice is ineradicable.
Coltrane was inevitably cast as John Falstaff in Henry V (1989), opposite Kenneth Branagh’s Prince Hal, in which their tense, quasi-father-son scenes could be read as a dummy run for the much happier and less complicated relationship of Hagrid and Harry. He gives a good performance as Falstaff, and his pleadingly insecure “banish not sweet Jack Falstaff,” speech from Henry IV Part 1 is imported into Henry V, in order to create that vital betrayal narrative. But maybe a big performer such as Coltrane needs a bigger stage or screen to make that big Shakespearian role work, a movie more like Orson Welles’s Falstaff epic Chimes at Midnight.
Elsewhere, Coltrane had developed a superb comic career in TV drama and comedy, such as Tutti Frutti, with Emma Thompson, which first made him a household name, and he was
also a tremendous turn in Blackadder, playing Samuel Johnson, a role which he also played in a one-off 1993 TV drama in the now defunct Screenplay strand. This was John Byrne’s Boswell & Johnson’s Tour of the Western Isles, with John Sessions playing the florid literary careerist Boswell and Coltrane – intriguingly – playing the great Englishman, and an Englishman with no very natural love of the Scottish at that. It is my favourite of Coltrane’s
performances: it gives him more scope to develop that formidable cerebral presence, a glowering, uncompromising, difficult and overpowering character, not leavened by obvious comedy or villainy or sentimentality.
And then, in 2016, came Coltrane’s late-period performance masterpiece - the damaged, culpable, washed-up comic Paul Finchley in the TV drama series National Treasure, written by Jack Thorne. His Finchley is a performer caught in a Yewtree operation, discovered to be guilty of a series of rapes that he didn’t consider rapes - just his celebrity entitlement. Coltrane presented a different figure: gaunt, frail, walking with a limp – his face a mask of disdain and incomprehension. He eerily resembled the courtroom-era Harvey Weinstein. His performance opposite the equally compelling Julie Walters was grippingly horrible – the jaunty showbiz mannerisms corroded to a grimace of pain. And his performance had an extra dimension when he and his wife periodically have to visit his traumatised and damaged daughter (powerfully played by Andrea Riseborough) in her grim flat; the young woman who has been grimly affected by her toxically dysfunctional dad.
Robbie Coltrane was a big man in every sense, a physical one-off, not easily absorbed into the typecast world of movies and drama, understandably reluctant to get too associated with Cracker’s Fitz, but good-humouredly content to become a much-loved figure for legions of young Potter fans. Maybe he would have been a great supervillain, the way Alfred Molina played Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man, but this never appealed to him. Coltrane was smart, funny, stylish – a cool guy for the 80s comedy generation to have on its side, a black-comic genius in pioneering crime drama and everyone’s favourite dad or granddad in Harry Potter. Movies and television have become a bit more flavourless with the sad departure of Robbie Coltrane.