His agent confirmed the news on Friday. Born Anthony Robert MacMillan in the affluent Glasgow suburb of Rutherglen, Coltrane studied at Glenalmond College, an independent boarding school whose corporal punishment he described as “legalised violence”, before attending the Glasgow School of Art. He had second thoughts about his ability as a painter, and switched to live performances, playing in radical theater companies (including a troupe from San Quentin State Prison) and doing standup, taking the pseudonym Coltrane as a tribute to the famous jazz musician John Coltrane. His first screen film was Waterloo Sunset, the Richard Eyre-directed Play for Today in 1979, in which he played opposite home runaway Queenie Watts. He then made cameo appearances in films and TV shows including Flash Gordon, Are You Being Served?, Krull and Britannia Hospital, his distinctive looks and sheer size helped him stand out from the crowd. Coltrane’s comedic skills began to take precedence as he found success in the early 1980s on sketch television shows such as Alfresco and A Kick Up the Eighties. These placed him firmly in the scholastic alternative comedy of the 80s alongside Ben Elton, Emma Thompson and Rik Mayall – an identity reinforced by his regular participation in Comic Strip Presents, including staples such as Five Go Mad in Dorset, The Beat Generation and The Bullshitters. . However, Coltrane’s skills as an actor were increasingly being proven, and he had a major hit in 1987 with Tutti Frutti, the John Byrne scripted Bafta-winning TV series about a shabby Scottish rock’n’roll band. Coltrane found himself increasingly in demand for larger roles in high-profile plays, from Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (in which he played a cardinal) to Falstaff in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry II. However, it was two comedies with a religious theme – Nuns on the Run and The Pope Must Die – that propelled Coltrane to stardom and put him on the map in the US. Coltrane’s elevated status was confirmed by his casting as criminal psychologist “Fitz” Fitzgerald in Jimmy McGovern’s television series Cracker, which first aired in 1993. A challenging non-comedic role, Fitzgerald was a groundbreaking creation: brilliant at work his but confused his personal life. Coltrane won the Bafta Award for Best Television Actor in 1994, 1995 and 1996 for the role. Fitzgerald’s addictive lifestyle also mirrored the actor: Coltrane admitted to heavy drinking in the 1980s and remained notoriously combative, once threatening to beat up Piers Morgan in a London restaurant. He then found himself in two Bond films, GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough, as the morally ambiguous KGB agent Valentin Dmitrovich Zhukovsky. Coltrane settled into a mid-career career alternating roles in plush Hollywood productions (Message in a Bottle, From Hell, Ocean’s Twelve) with low-key television appearances (Alice in Wonderland, The Gruffalo). He also showed his interest in vintage cars in Coltrane’s Planes and Automobiles series in 1997. However, he topped the list for the casting of Hogwarts schoolmaster Rubeus Hagrid in the film adaptation of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The first in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was released in 2001 and won Coltrane a new audience of younger fans and helped revive his career, particularly on British television. In 2009, he played detective DI Hain in David Pirie’s Murderland and his performance as a TV star accused of sexual abuse in the 2016 Channel 4 show National Treasure was met with acclaim. Coltrane married sculptor Rhona Gemmell in 1999, but they divorced in 2003. They had two children.
