As lives on as voice of Space Odyssey’s HAL
The film featured a cast of prehistoric apes, scientists investigating a mysterious black monolith on the moon, astronauts bound for Jupiter, and a ‘‘star child’’ floating above Earth. But to critics and fans, the most compelling character in 2001: A Space Odyssey was a talking computer, the HAL 9000. Depicted by film-maker Stanley Kubrick as a camera lens with a glowing red dot, HAL was voiced to chilling effect by Douglas Rain, a Shakespearean actor celebrated as one of the finest classical stage performers in Canada.
Rain was 90 when he died in St Marys, Ontario, about 20 kilometres from Stratford, where he had lived and long performed with the company of the Stratford Festival.
A former child actor for the radio broadcaster Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Rain studied at Laurence Olivier’s drama school in Britain before returning in 1953 to Canada, where he played supporting parts in the Stratford Festival’s inaugural production, Richard III.
He performed at the festival for 32 seasons, settling some two blocks from the theatre and erecting a partial model of its thrust stage in his attic, where he practised at night after rehearsals. He described his work as that of a ‘‘glorified detective’’, a craft in which he was driven to pore over scripts for insight into a character’s background and motivation.
Actress Marion Day, who performed alongside Rain at several productions, said that, when he delivered his lines, ‘‘it was as if the language and himself and everything just disappeared. He took away a barrier between me and the writer. 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.’’
In a quirk of the stage, Rain starred several times as Prince Hal, in Shakespeare’s two-part history Henry IV. But he became far better known for his more subdued portrayal of HAL, whose servile demeanour and detached, near-monotone voice are sometimes credited with informing the personas of Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri.
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’’, writer and producer Gerry Flahive wrote in an account of HAL’S origins for the New York Times.
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. Fearing 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.
‘‘Open the pod bay doors, HAL,’’ the last surviving astronaut, Dave Bowman, says
‘‘If you could have been a ghost at the recording, you would have thought it was a load of rubbish.’’ Douglas Rain on his part in 2001: A Space Odyssey
while trapped outside the ship. ‘‘I’m sorry, Dave,’’ HAL responds. ‘‘I’m afraid I can’t do that . . . This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it.’’
Rain was far from Kubrick’s first choice to play HAL. 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.
About that same time, he hired Rain to narrate a science-heavy prologue for the film, which was later cut. Months into filming, when Kubrick decided that Balsam ‘‘sounded a little bit too colloquially American’’, he asked Rain to give it a shot.
Although some early critics said 2001 was too long and too slow, the movie has acquired the reputation of a science-fiction masterpiece, with Rain’s performance often singled out for praise. His character was ranked 13th on the American Film Institute’s list of greatest movie villains, ahead of the shark from Jaws and the Nazi commandant Amon Goeth from Schindler’s List.
Rain played HAL again in a sequel, 2010: The Year We Made Contact (1984), written and directed by Peter Hyams. But he resisted efforts to commercialise his performance, declining to provide the voice for an Apple commercial during the 1999 Super Bowl.
He also cultivated techniques to avoid attention from fans who asked him to ‘‘open the pod bay doors,’’ creating ‘‘a secret ring’’ for friends who wanted to reach him on his home telephone and devising a quick escape route from the Stratford, Day said.
‘‘He’d be changed before anyone else could think of being changed,’’ she said, ‘‘and go down into the underworld under the stage, go up into a tunnel next to the audience, and leave while they were getting up out of their seats and collecting their programmes – with his cap down over his eyes so people wouldn’t know it was him.’’
Douglas James Rain was born in Winnipeg, to a father who was a switchman for the Canadian National Railway, and a mother who was a nurse. He graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1950 and studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in Britain before nailing an audition that brought him to Stratford. The festival’s early productions were held in a tent, where line readings were sometimes accompanied by cheers from a nearby baseball field.
His marriages to Lois Shaw and Martha Henry, a fellow Stratford performer, ended in divorce. Survivors include two sons from his first marriage; a daughter from his second marriage; and a granddaughter.
In an interview this year, Rain said he completed his 2001 recordings in about 10 hours. At one point, Kubrick had him sing Daisy Bell – the love song that HAL croaks out before being disconnected – about 50 times, in varying tempos and pitches. Kubrick went with the first take. ‘‘If you could have been a ghost at the recording, you would have thought it was a load of rubbish,’’ Rain said.
He never got the chance to see otherwise. In the 50 years since its release, he had never seen the film. –