Robbie Coltrane, the acclaimed comedic actor who played Rubeus Hagrid in the Harry Potter film series, has died at the age of 72, according to his agency. Coltrane had been ill for approximately two years before his death in a hospital near his home in Larbert, Scotland.
Coltrane appeared in all eight Harry Potter films, playing a clumsy yet charming father figure to the titular orphan. He also played Russian criminal Valentin Zukovsky in the James Bond flicks GoldenEye (1995) and The World Is Not Enough (1999), and he won three straight BAFTA Awards for outstanding actor in the ITV crime series Cracker. Michael Gambon is the only other actor to have that honor.
Coltrane was featured in the one-of-a-kind commemorative film Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts, which was released on New Year’s Day this year, just as his health was deteriorating. “The legacy of the movies is that my children’s generation will teach them to their children so that you may be watching them in 50 years, simple,” he stated in one of the most talked-about snippets. Unfortunately, I will not be present. “However, Hagrid will.”
On March 30, 1950, he was born Anthony Robert McMillan and used the stage name Coltrane to honor his favorite musician, John Coltrane. In the 1970s, he established himself as a rising sketch comedy sensation on London’s stages, and he broke into the cinema with a modest role in 1980’s Flash Gordon.
By the end of the decade, he had established himself as a genuine celebrity, appearing in Blackadder the Third, releasing the sketch and stand-up program The Robbie Coltrane Special, and portraying possibly Shakespeare’s funniest character, Falstaff, in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. Nuns on the Run, in which he co-starred with Eric Idle, was released in 1990. He won the Evening Standard British Film Award – Peter Sellers Award for Comedy in 1991 for his performance as the Pope in The Pope Must Die.
He portrayed Dr. Edward “Fitz” Fitzgerald in Cracker from 1993 to 1995, earning him three BAFTA Awards, and in the second part of that decade, he delivered some of the most iconic performances in the James Bond franchise. When Harry Potter called, he was already pretty well-known, and his trophy case was full.
From 2001 until 2011, he portrayed Rubeus Hagrid, Hogwarts’ keeper of keys and gardens. His humor and melancholy kept the early films together while the young actors were still figuring out their trade, and the scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II where he carried what he believed was Harry’s lifeless corpse ranks among the series’ greatest acting.
Coltrane has provided the voice for animated films such as The Tale of Despereaux and Brave, and in 2006, Queen Elizabeth II gave him the Order of the British Empire. His final on-screen appearance was as Orson Welles in Sky UK’s Urban Myths.