

Kubrick was reportedly inspired to cast Rain after viewing Universe, a 1964 animated documentary narrated by the actor.Īt first, HAL, self-described as "foolproof and incapable of error," is a sturdy member of an astronaut crew headed for Jupiter, keeping spaceship functions running smoothly and maintaining friendly if unemotional relationships with its crew mates - Dr.
Siri and hal 9000 movie#
The American Film Institute ranked HAL as the 13th greatest movie villain of all time. Clarke and widely regarded as Kubrick's masterpiece. However, Rain's biggest mark on pop culture was less Shakespearean, but perhaps just as much a classic: as 2001's HAL 9000, a sentient, rogue computer in a film written in collaboration with science-fiction author Arthur C. The Winnipeg-born actor had dozens of theater, film and television credits. Getting the Hal 9000 sound effects to work takes a little bit more effort. The Hal icon is easily installed by downloading the tweak from the Big Boss repo, and activating it from WinterBoard. He was also a founding member of the company. Siri9000 is a useless but fun jailbreak tweak that transforms Siri into HAL 9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Canadian actor died Sunday morning, according to the Stratford Festival, where Rain spent 32 seasons acting in such roles such as Othello's Iago and Twelfth Night's Malvolio. In 1972, he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Supporting or Featured Actor in a Drama for his performance as William Cecil in "Vivat! Vivat Regina!" on Broadway.Douglas Rain in Canada, July of this year.ĭouglas Rain, a Shakespeare actor who provided the eerie, calmly homicidal voice of HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at the age of 90. Rain was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and trained at the Old Vic Theatre in London. "The thing that captured the audience's imagination back then more even than a chatty computer decades before Siri and Alexa was that unnervingly, HAL had a mind of his own," the NPR critic Bob Mondello wrote in April on the 50th anniversary of the film's release.Ī survey by the American Film Institute ranked HAL as the 13th-greatest villain in movie history. The red lens that served as the 'eye' of the HAL 9000 computer in '2001: A Space Odyssey' - one of the iconic images in movie history. "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it," HAL quietly tells astronaut Dave Bowman before proceeding to explain matter-of-factly that it had learned of Bowman's and Poole's plans to disconnect it by reading their lips. HAL concluded that the first command superseded the second. He had been given conflicting programming: Ensure the success of the mission at all costs, while also protecting the lives of the crew. HAL's reasoning and explanation were cold, precise and - at least in its mind - unavoidably logical. 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. Even Siri pokes fun of HAL - just ask the assistant to 'open the pod bay doors.' Apple ( AAPL, Fortune 500) also used HAL 9000 in a 1999 Macintosh commercial, taking a jab at IBM ( IBM. 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. dxcffgGEiA- Stratford Festival November 12, 2018 Our thoughts and prayers are with his family. Today we lost Douglas Rain, a member of our founding company and a hugely esteemed presence on our stages for 32 seasons.
