![]() ![]() Clarke, the character was originally envisioned for an actress – Kubrick’s notes mention Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand as possibilities – before Kubrick settled on a man, casting Bronx-born character actor Martin Balsam.Ībout that same time, Kubrick hired Rain to narrate a science-heavy prologue for the film. Devised by Kubrick and his fellow screenwriter, Arthur C. Rain was far from Kubrick’s first choice to play HAL. This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.” ![]() “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” the last surviving astronaut, Dave Bowman (Dullea), says while trapped outside the ship. Fearing that the crew will prevent the mission from being carried out, he murders three scientists who are being kept in hibernation, then severs the oxygen hose of a fourth crew member during a spacewalk. In “2001: A Space Odyssey,” HAL was charged with overseeing the success of a mission to Jupiter, where the crew of Discovery One is sent to investigate an unusual radio signal. ![]() Rain’s HAL has become the default reference, not just for the voice, but also for the humanesque qualities of what a sentient machine’s personality should be,” Gerry Flahive, a writer and producer, wrote in an April account of HAL’s origins for the New York Times. In a quirk of the stage, Rain also starred several times as Prince Hal, the rebellious protagonist of Shakespeare’s two-part history “Henry IV.” But he became far better known for his more subdued portrayal of HAL, whose servile demeanor and detached, near-monotone voice are sometimes credited with informing the personas of Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. Though he spent nearly his entire career in Canada, he was nominated for a Tony Award in 1972 for his supporting role as William Cecil, the wily statesman in “Vivat! Vivat Regina!,” playwright Robert Bolt’s take on the rivalry between Queen Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary Queen of Scots. These things were happening for the first time, as if no one had ever thought them or said them before, as if they were newly minted.” He took away a barrier between me and the writer. There were just ideas and thoughts and complex moments happening inside me. When Rain delivered his lines, she added, “it was as if the language and himself and everything just disappeared. In a statement, Stratford artistic director Antoni Cimolino called Rain one of Canadian theater’s “greatest talents and a guiding light in its development,” adding that he “shared many of the same qualities as Kubrick’s iconic creation: precision, strength of steel, enigma and infinite intelligence, as well as a wicked sense of humor.”Ī onetime child actor for the radio broadcaster Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Rain studied at Laurence Olivier’s drama school in Britain before returning to Canada in 1953, where he played supporting parts in the Stratford’s inaugural production, “Richard III,” and served as the understudy for Alec Guinness in the title role. The festival announced his death but did not give a precise cause. Marys, Ontario, about a dozen miles from Stratford, where he had lived and long performed with the repertory company of the Stratford Festival. Depicted by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick as a camera lens with a glowing red dot – a cycloptic eye that enabled him to read lips – HAL was voiced to chilling effect by Douglas Rain, a Shakespearean actor celebrated as one of the finest classical stage performers in Canada. The film featured a cast of prehistoric apes, scientists investigating a mysterious black monolith on the moon, astronauts bound for Jupiter, and an embryonic “star child” floating above Earth.īut to critics, fans and the 1968 movie’s nominal leading man, actor Keir Dullea, the most compelling character in “2001: A Space Odyssey” was far and away a talking computer, the HAL 9000.
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