One of Britain’s most well-known comedians, Robbie Coltrane, who oversaw the school’s debating society and received awards for his work, is now a movie star who has been in two James Bond movies in the “Harry Potter” series.
Coltrane was born Anthony Robert McMillan in Rutherglen, a neighborhood of Glasgow, Scotland, on March 30, 1950. Jean Ross (Howie), his mother, was a pianist and teacher. His father, general physician Ian Baxter McMillan, also served as a police pathologist. Young Robbie loved movies, music, art, and automobiles. He devoured his father’s books on medicine and law enforcement. At Glenalmond College, he made his stage acting debut at age 12 by delivering rants from “Henry V.” Orson Welles and Marlon Brando captivated him at the time.
He majored in drawing, painting, and cinema at Glasgow Art School before spending a year studying art at Edinburgh’s Moray House College of Education. He produced the 1973 documentary “Young Mental Health,” which was chosen as the Scottish Education Council’s Film of the Year. Due to his love of jazz at the time, Robbie adopted the stage name Coltrane and started a career as a stand-up comedian at nightclubs, at the Edinburgh Festival, and as an actor with Edinburgh’s famed Traverse Theatre.
Coltrane made his cinematic debut as a limo driver in Death Watch in 1981 after making his television debut as “Border Guard” in the BBC miniseries The Lost Tribe in 1980. (1980). He played Detective Fritz Langley in Subway Riders (1981), directed by renowned underground filmmaker Amos Poe, in 1981, which was his debut appearance in a prominent role.
His appearances in The Comic Strip series, Alfresco (1983), and the Comic Strip flicks The Supergrass (1985) and The Pope Must Die (1991), among other movies, helped him become a well-known figure. At the time, Coltrane struggled with alcoholism and consumed up to a bottle of whiskey every day. He traveled to a facility in Mexico in 1986 to receive treatment for obesity. His 15-year partner in 1987
Coltrane first met Rhona Gemmell, then 18 years old, in a bar in 1988. They were married and had a daughter named Alice and a son named Spencer. With the lead part of Dr. Eddie “Fitz” Fitzgerald, a forensic psychologist, in the hit television series Cracker, his career took off in the early 1990s (1993).
His portrayal of Valentin Zukovsky, a former KGB agent turned St. Petersburg mafia leader, in GoldenEye (1995), was so effective that the film’s producers asked him to reprise the role in The World Is Not Enough (1999). Then Coltrane became involved in another successful property when J.K. Rowling personally chose him to play the half-giant Rubeus Hagrid in the “Harry Potter” movies.
Early in the 1990s, Coltrane published his autobiography, “Coltrane in a Cadillac,” and he also starred in the television series of the same name, Coltrane in a Cadillac (1993), in which he indulges his love of classic cars and humorously recounts his 4,050-mile trip from Los Angeles to New York. He was divorced from his wife in 2003. Reading, restoring, and collecting classic cars have been some of his hobbies outside of the acting industry. Robbie Coltrane dwells in Stirlingshire, Scotland, a former farmhouse.
