It’s a long time since I was in touch with Robbie Coltrane. But I loved him so. He was a complicated man. With comedians, people always think that you look at them and you laugh, but there was so much more to Robbie than that. He had quite a sour, angry look at the world in many ways. I think that’s what gave him a depth in his acting that was quite stupendous. He was a major actor – I thought he was really gifted. One of the problems about Harry Potter is that it tends to obliterate all the other things that you do, because it’s such a powerful franchise. But Robbie was so much more than Hagrid.
Of course he was funny, but he made you laugh on both sides of your face, so to speak, because he saw the pain of life as well. And I think his last years were not happy. He retreated from the world a bit. I wasn’t in touch with him, but it wasn’t because we stopped being friends. You didn’t stop being friends with Robbie. He was a real presence in my life.
