Douglas Rain, the creepy voice of HAL in ‘2001,’ dies at 90
Rain’s sinuous, detached reading of HAL’s lines made the computer’s murders of four astronauts all the more shocking.
By Alex Johnson
Douglas Rain, the acclaimed Shakespearean actor whose chilling performance as the voice of the homicidal HAL 9000 computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” rendered the amoral emptiness of outer space in sound, died Sunday at age 90.
The Stratford Festival, the Canadian theater company of which Rain was a founding member in 1953, confirmed his death on Sunday night. A cause of death wasn’t reported.
“Today we lost Douglas Rain, a member of our founding company and a hugely esteemed presence on our stages for 32 seasons,” the company said. “He will be greatly missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.”
The HAL 9000 computer was the sentient controller of life support, systems and — although it wasn’t revealed until later in the movie — the very mission of Discovery One, the spacecraft that is sent to Jupiter to investigate a mysterious black obelisk in the landmark 1968 science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.
Rain’s sinuous, detached reading of HAL’s lines made the computer’s murders of three astronauts as they slept in suspended animation and its subsequent stranding of astronaut Frank Poole to die in open space all the more shocking.