Douglas Rain
Shakespearean actor best known as the voice of computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey
DOUGLAS RAIN, who has died aged 90, was the voice of HAL 9000, the brilliant but psychotic computer who turns on his human masters in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science-fiction film epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
On a huge space station rotating in deep space to the accompaniment of Johann Strauss II’S Blue Danube waltz (Kubrick’s inspired choice of music), Hal holds two astronauts, played by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, in thrall. Part Frankenstein’s monster and part Big Brother, the neurotic “Heuristically programmed Algorithmic computer”, with its suave, slightly effeminate voice and single unblinking red eye, emerges as the film’s most memorable character.
Yet at first Rain, a diminutive Canadian-born Shakespearean actor classically trained at the Old Vic, was not interested in “voicing” the role, having originally been hired for his melodic tenor to narrate an explanatory prologue, which Kubrick later decided to drop.
Originally Hal’s lines had been recorded by Martin Balsam, who had played the detective in Psycho, but Kubrick was unhappy with the result and persuaded Rain to play the sinister computer.
He recorded Hal’s dialogue in late 1967 in MGM’S studio at Borehamwood, Hertfordshire. Rain, then 39, had neither seen the script nor met any of the actors, whose scenes had been shot about a year before, with Hal’s lines shouted to them off-camera by, among others, a Cockney assistant director, Derek Cracknell. That process was, Keir Dullea remembered, “like working with Michael Caine”.
In Rain’s hands, however, Hal’s words emerged as measured, almost monotone, authoritative and strangely serene – a model of precision, control and elegance.
“I’m sorry, Dave,” Hal says to one of the astronauts at one point, with a frisson of menace. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it.”
According to the sound engineers present, Rain did the recordings with his bare feet resting on a pillow, in order to maintain the required tone – the “unctuous, patronising, neuter quality” Kubrick was looking for. “A cool, soothing voice,” Rain called it.
When the astronauts realise that Hal is spying on them, they decide to dismantle him. When the dying machine offers to sing the sentimental old musical-hall song Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two), the computer’s realisation that his end is nigh at barely nine years old provided what some critics considered to be one of the most unbearable death scenes ever filmed. Douglas James Rain was born on March 13 1928 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and worked as a child actor on Canadian radio in the 1930s. After graduating from Kelvin High School in 1946, he enrolled at the University of Manitoba and joined its dramatic society before training as an actor at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta and the Old Vic theatre school in London. As a young actor, he understudied Alec Guinness in a production of Richard III in 1953, and appeared regularly on the West End stage alongside stars such as Peter Finch and Joan Plowright.
Rain returned to Canada in 1953 to become a founding member of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. He made his Broadway debut in 1956 in Tamburlaine the Great, and a year later appeared with his fellow Canadian William Shatner (later famous as Captain Kirk in Star Trek) in the film Oedipus Rex, directed by the Stratford Festival’s co-founder, Tyrone Guthrie.
The collaboration between Rain and Guthrie lasted nearly 50 years, most notably when he played another Hal – King Henry V – in a production of Henry V which was adapted for television in 1966. He also starred as Macbeth opposite Maggie Smith in 1978, as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in 1996 and Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons in 1998. In 1972 Rain was nominated for a Tony award for his performance opposite Claire Bloom in Vivat! Vivat Regina!
Kubrick had heard Rain in Universe (1960), a documentary short about astronomy produced by the National Film Board of Canada that the actor had narrated. Kubrick told an interviewer that he “had some difficulty deciding exactly what Hal should sound like”, eventually considering Balsam to have sounded too colloquially American. But he felt that Rain “had the kind of bland mid-atlantic accent we felt was right for the part”.
Among Kubrick’s notes for Rain were: “Sound a little more like it’s a peculiar request”; “Just try it closer and more depressed”; and “Even softer and kind of in the depths”.
With the voice recorded line by line, the session was completed in under 10 hours, spread over two days, with Kubrick sitting four feet across from him but supplying no visual cues to work with. “He was a bit secretive about the film,” Rain explained. “I never saw the finished script and I never saw a foot of the shooting.”
Woody Allen persuaded Rain to voice another evil computer in his futuristic comedy Sleeper (1973), and in 1984 Peter Hyams talked him into reprising the role of Hal in the ill-fated sequel, 2010. With Keir Dullea, Rain was one of only two actors to appear in both films.
“He’s a classical actor in Canada,” Dullea told American public radio in 2010. “This is not a quote, but I’m told that his attitude is: ‘I’ve done Shakespeare and the classics for 50 years, and all anyone wants to talk to me about is a film that I worked on for two days.’ ”
Douglas Rain was twice married and divorced and had three children.
Douglas Rain, born March 13 1928, died November 11 2018