Canadian actor Douglas Rain must have one of the best known voices on the movie screen, and despite a relatively limited career in film, much of his renown comes from voicing HAL, the on board computer of the spacecraft USS Discovery, in 1967’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the 1984 follow-up 2010: Odyssey Two.
Yet what does he look like? I don’t recall ever seeing a photo of the person himself, and I’ve not seen any of the other movies he has featured in.
Interestingly a search of the two most obvious general reference online resources, Wikipedia, and The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), fails to turn up anything.
A little digging around did yield a few images at Northern Stars, a resource dedicated to Canadian movie actors and producers, the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia, also a repository of Canadian film and theatre luminaries, and there’s a smaller image towards the end of this page at Bonesaw’s Schitzoid Theatre.
If you have, or know of any other photos of Douglas Rain, please leave a link in the comments section below, or send me through the URL.
I worked with Douglas Rain in the late 80s and early nineties. A brilliant, deeply shy, grumpy, funny, acerbic, kind and private man- I’m not surprised you haven’t found many pics of him. I would search through the Stratford Festival archives.
Cheers