Sfellow players Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint agree: Nobody could have played the half-giant Rubeus Hagrid in the “Harry Potter” films other than Robbie Coltrane, whom they assure of their admiration in short obituaries online. Someone like Hagrid, according to the youngsters of the time, has to have stature like Coltrane, who was also what Joanne K. Rowling wanted to cast: a man with a huge heart, awkward, clumsy, full of humour, caring and of course – heart-educated.
Robbie Coltrane, born on March 30, 1950 in Rutherglen, Scotland under the name Anthony Robert McMillan (he changed his name out of admiration for the jazz trumpeter John Coltrane), already distinguished himself with such a profile almost thirty years ago. As criminal psychologist Dr. Eddie “Fitz” Fitzgerald set Coltrane the benchmark for a genre in which he has since found countless imitators in the ITV series Cracker.
His Fitz was an irresistibly unadapted motorist, drunk, chain smoker, gambler, cheater, depressive, relationship and professional despairer who, despite everything, carries on and – of course – solves the case, which the officers from the Vollpfostenpolizei never succeed in doing. Why can he? Because he believes that anyone would rob a bank if there was no penalty for doing so, and because he likes people as flawed beings, even though he tries his best to testify to the contrary. Perhaps also because its inventor is Catholic, as author Jimmy McGovern said when asked about Fitz: “The knowledge of the human psyche” that one needs to have in order to write such a character and series “everything comes from Catholicism”.
His most famous role: Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid in Harry Potter.
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Image: picture alliance / Everett Colle
Since Fitz, as he was seen on ZDF from 1996, the trained stand-up comedian Robbie Coltrane has been in demand – on stage, on television, in the cinema as a former KGB agent in two “James Bond” films and finally as Hagrid in “Harry Potter”, as which he received meter by meter of fan mail until the end. Robbie Coltrane died last Friday at the age of 72.
