He was innate around Rutherglen, Glasgow and educated (periodically) at Glenalmond school within Perthshire, Glasgow School of Art, and a Moray Home College Of Education inside Edinburgh. He go withinside acting in his early twenties, take stage title Coltrane (in tribute to jazz saxist John Coltrane) and working around theatre and stand-up comedy.

His laughable skills brought him roles in the television series The Comic Strip Presents (1982) and he was one of a stars of Laugh? I Nearly Paid My Licence Fee (1984). He shortly get into films, obtaining small roles around the total of picture show like Death Watch (1980), Scrubbers (1983), Absolute Beginners (1986) and Mona Lisa (1986). within television he too appeared in Tutti Frutti (1987), as Samuel Johnson in Blackadder (1987) (a role he late reprised in the extra good ''Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Islands (1993)), and in a number of stand-up and sketch comedy shows.

He co-starred by using Eric Idle in Nuns on the Run (1990), and played a Pope in The Pope Must Die (1991). He likewise played the would-manque personal detective obsessed by owning Humphrey Bogart in the TV play The Bogie Man. His roles went from either nature and severity to nature and severity in the 1990s with the TV series Cracker (1993-1996) and the BAFTA award as a stepping stone to area around large films like a James Bond films GoldenEye (1995) and The World Is Not Enough (1999), when well as half-giant Rubeus Hagrid in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'' (2005).

Coltrane exists touching Glasgow, is married & has 2 kids, & collects vintage cars.