Robbie Coltrane, the beloved comic actor who starred as Rubeus Hagrid in the Harry Potter film franchise, is dead at the age of 72, his agent confirmed to Deadline. Coltrane had been in poor health for about two years, and died in a hospital near his Larbert, Scotland, home.
Coltrane featured prominently in all eight films in the Harry Potter series, serving as a bumbling but lovable father figure to the titular orphan. He also stole scenes in the James Bond films GoldenEye (1995) and The World Is Not Enough (1999) as Russian gangster Valentin Zukovsky, and won three consecutive BAFTA Awards for best actor in the ITV crime series Cracker. Michael Gambon is the only other actor to achieve that distinction.
Coltrane appeared in the anniversary special Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts, which dropped on New Year’s Day this year, at a time when his health was already failing. In one of the most talked-about clips, he said, “The legacy of the movies is that my children’s generation will show them to their children, so you could be watching in 50 years time, easy. I’ll not be here sadly. But Hagrid will.”
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He was born Anthony Robert McMillan on March 30th, 1950, and adopted the stage name Coltrane as a tribute to his favorite musician, John Coltrane. In the 1970s he earned a reputation on the stages of London as a rising sketch comedy star, and he broke into film with a small part in 1980’s Flash Gordon.
By the end of that decade he was a bona fide star, releasing the sketch and stand-up show The Robbie Coltrane Special, and appearing as perhaps Shakespeare’s funniest character, Falstaff, in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. In 1990 he starred opposite Eric Idle in Nuns on the Run, and in 1991 he played the Pope in The Pope Must Die, for which he won the Evening Standard British Film Award – Peter Sellers Award for Comedy.
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