LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Robbie Coltrane: Death Watch
built 279 days ago
The other notion is more accurate, and shows that Coltrane gained experience and connections via comedy, but actually undertook a far more traditional and actorly route to the top. His first role, for instance, was in Death Watch, shot in Glasgow and based on DG Compton's sci-fi novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe. Directed by Bertrand Tavernier and starring Harvey Keitel and Romy Schneider (in one of her final roles), it involved a man surreptitiously filming a dying woman and broadcasting to the world - and this two decades before The Truman Show and Big Brother. To balance this, he played a gay hairdresser in Mickey Dolenz's Metal Mickey, as well as various roles in the spoof travelogue Balham: Gateway to The South... directed by Dolenz. Then there was a brief appearance in Flash Gordon, sheltering from fiery rain sent by Ming The Merciless, and then Subway Rider, where Coltrane played a detective (Fritz Langley - spot the homage) on the track of a sax-playing murderer (John Lurie). This was directed by Amos Poe, famed underground director of The Blank Generation, whom Coltrane had met in the late Seventies when hanging around New York with musicians, actors, anyone who could feed his curious mind.
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Coltrane soon moved into films, obtaining roles in a number of movies such as Flash Gordon (1980), Death Watch (1980), Scrubbers (1983), Krull (1983), Absolute Beginners (1986), Mona Lisa (1986) and appeared as "Annabelle" in The Fruit Machine (1988). On television, he ... appeared in The Young Ones, Tutti Frutti (1987), as Samuel Johnson in Blackadder (1987) (a role he later reprised in the more serious Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Islands (1993)), and in a number of stand-up and sketch comedy shows.
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Both are devoted to this sport and give Robbie an impromptu demonstration. Tracey is a wrestling champion; she has won an array of medals and invites Robbie to watch her in a big annual competition.
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Death Watch