Canadian actor Douglas Rain, voice of sinister computer HAL in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, dies aged 90
- Douglas Rain’s ‘arresting’ voice impressed Stanley Kubrick, with a flat delivery that the director said evoked ‘the intelligent friend next door’
- Rain rejected a string of commercial approaches to cash in on the famous ‘Hal’ voice, in order to protect Kubrick’s vision from exploitation
Douglas Rain, the Canadian actor who voiced vengeful supercomputer HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a precursor of artificial intelligence in smartphones, has died. He was 90.
According to the Stratford Festival, a repertory theatre festival of which he was a founding member, Rain died in hospital near Toronto of natural causes Sunday morning.
“Canadian theatre has lost one of its greatest talents and a guiding light in its development,” the festival’s artistic director Antoni Cimolino said in a statement.
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Rain began performing as a child actor on CBC Radio before going on to work on stage – having once understudied Alec Guinness in Richard III in Stratford – and in film, racking up more than 40 acting and voice credits from 1955 to 1995.
But, Cimolino noted, “it was as HAL that Rain made an indelible mark on popular culture.”
