Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Hal discovered a plan by Dave (Keir Dullea) and Frank (Gary Lockwood) to disconnect him 
 
 Actor Douglas Rain, who was the voice of the sinister computer Hal in sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died, the organisers of a theatre festival he founded have said. 
 
 Rain died at the age of 90, according to the Stratford Festival in Canada. 
 
 The actor performed for 32 seasons at the Shakespearean festival and was nominated for a Tony Award in 1972. 
 
 But he will be best remembered as the voice of Hal 9000, the AI computer in Stanley Kubrick's landmark 1968 film. 
 
 Hal controlled the spacecraft's functions, but ended up rebelling against its human commanders when they planned to disconnect him after suspecting he was malfunctioning. 
 
 The film is regarded as a cinematic masterpiece and won an Oscar for Kubrick for best visual effects. 
 
 Rain's chilling, dry voice is key to the drama, but he wasn't the first choice to play the computer. 
 
 The director originally selected Oscar winner Martin Balsam - but decided he was "too colloquially American". 
 
 He also considered actor Nigel Davenport in the role, but later concluded he did not want a British voice. 
 
 So he called upon Rain after hearing his voice in the 1960 documentary Universe, according to The New York Times. 
 
 The actor recorded all his lines in 10 hours over two days, with the director sat "three feet away, explaining the scenes to me and reading all the parts", he said. 
 
 But, according to the New York Times, Rain never saw the finished film. 
 
 Stratford Festival's artistic director Antoni Cimolino said the actor shared Hal's intelligence - with added "warmth and humanity". 
 
 Anthony Hopkins said Hal influenced his performance as serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. 
 
 Beyond 2001, Rain was an accomplished stage and screen actor, and earned his Tony nomination for his role in Robert Bolt's Vivat! Vivat! Regina! on Broadway. 
 
 Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk. ||||| Mr. 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. Just ask Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home — the cadence, the friendly formality, the pleasant intelligence and sense of calm control in their voices evoke Mr. Rain’s unforgettable performance. As we warily eye a future utterly transformed by A.I. incursions into all aspects of our lives, HAL has been lurking. 
 
 To Scott Brave, the co-author of “Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship,” HAL 9000 is a mix between a butler and a psychoanalyst. “He has a sense of deference and of detachment,” Mr. Brave said, adding that he saw a ripple effect on, for example, the iPhone’s virtual assistant. “When I listen to something like Siri I feel there is a lot in common.” 
 
 Even when Kubrick was making the film, the director sensed HAL’s larger implications. He said in a 1969 interview with the author and critic Joseph Gelmis that one of the things he was trying to convey was “the reality of a world populated — as ours soon will be — by machine entities that have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.” 
 
 So how was this particular creature created? 
 
 The “2001” historian David Larson said that “Kubrick came up with the final HAL voice very late in the process. It was determined during ‘2001’ planning that in the future the large majority of computer command and communication inputs would be via voice, rather than via typewriter.” ||||| Hal Douglas, whose gravelly tones graced famous trailers for films such as Forrest Gump, Philadelphia and Lethal Weapon, has died. He was 89. 
 
 Douglas's daughter Sarah told the New York Times her father passed away following complications from pancreatic cancer. He was known as one of a top trio of trailer voiceover artists - the late Don LaFontaine and Don Morrow, voice of the Titanic trailer were the others - who came close to monopolising the industry for decades with catchphrases such as "In a world … ". 
 
 "The fact is, my voice has been out there," Douglas told the Times in 2009. "And it hangs out there. You sit down in the theatre and sometimes in three out of four trailers I'd be on them." 
 
 While Douglas was well known for the "in a world" phrase, there was some disagreement over whether he originated it, with LaFontaine claiming to have used it first. Unlike his late contemporary, who hired his own driver to take him from Hollywood studio to Hollywood studio at the height of his career in order to avoid wasting time on parking, Douglas worked mainly in New York studios. 
 
 Reading on mobile? Click here to view Comedian trailer 
 
 The voiceover artist's only known on-screen role came in the trailer for a 2002 documentary from Jerry Seinfeld, titled Comedian. While the film itself did not perform particularly well, Douglas's segment was viewed more than 700,000 times on YouTube. If features him repeatedly attempting to launch into the trailer with phrases such as "In a world … ", "In a land …" and "In a land before time… " while being unceremoniously interrupted (and eventually fired) by a producer determined to avoid such cliched phrases. 
 
 Born Harold Cone in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1924, Douglas flew as a US navy pilot in the second world war for three years before enrolling at the University of Miami via the GI bill to study acting. He began doing voiceover work to supplement his income from acting in New York during the late 1940s, and soon became much sought-after. 
 
 Douglas's story is told in the 2013 short film A Great Voice, in which he decried suggestions that his deep baritone was anything special. "I never thought of it as a great voice," he said, suggesting it was in fact "throaty, chesty, a voice in need of clearing". 
 
 Douglas died on 7 March at his home in Lovettsville, north Virginia. He leaves behind his wife Ruth, a daughter and two sons from a previous marriage, Jeremy and Jon. 
 
 • Hal Douglas - six of the best trailers from the voiceover king ||||| Enough is enough: It is not just that Interstellar is as incoherent and pretentious as a film can be at close to three hours and $160 million. It also sullies our last hallowed legend, the end of the world. How long have we labored, through diligent greed, opportunism, stupidity, cruelty, and indifference, to insist on the conclusion of business on Earth? What other large, altruistic, and merciful enterprise has such widespread support among religious extremists and rational scientists? Indeed, the coming end of the world is our best shared god. For if we must die, shouldn’t the Earth go too? Don’t we know we deserve an end to it all when Interstellar can pass itself off as an entertainment, instead of an ordeal? 
 
 Yes, I am speaking in the tongue of irony and I know that is abhorred now. So let me address what may be known as the story of this film. We are in an American heartland, and the single intriguing part of a ponderous movie. Times are growing very hard: The winds blow upon the prairies, causing heat and dust so that crops fail. There is a Biblical air in the cursed look of the place. In a world growing hungry, farmers are heroes again. Our hero is a dingbat farmer, named Cooper—and that name has resonance still in movie mythology and space history. (Cooper was Dennis Quaid in The Right Stuff, as well as a former icon named Gary.) 
 
 He lives with his father and his two children in a wooden house on the prairie in epic simplicity and alleged integrity—in short, it seems a dull life. Before that, Coop was a space pilot who did great things in pioneering flights. It’s not clear how long ago, because Matthew McConaughey can’t be much less than 45. Did he go to the Moon as an infant? But his character is nettled to have his children taught in school that the Apollo program was a propaganda lie promoted to win the Cold War. Coop knows what he knows, and he will soon be vindicated as the best terrific space pilot you ever saw. Because, you see, no less than Michael Caine (playing a scientific genius—I rest my case) reckons that since we can’t save Earth, we should leave it. This is where I began to feel a similar urging about my presence in the theater. 
 
 We’ll come to Caine, but McConaughey deserves examination. There were years when Matthew McConaughey was a handsome romantic lead in movies and a pain to watch. Then something happened. He lost weight, he gained calm or assurance, and he began to be a moody, dreamy, dangerous outsider. That welcome tendency reached a peak in “True Detective” and The Dallas Buyers Club. He had become a riveting performer, not far from crazy, and remote from any mainstream. But where could he go as an actor? Well, he is never going to be Gary Cooper; he is not a trusty pilot, a comic book champ, or a reliable family man. So Interstellar is misguided in trying to make him those things. McConaughey is hard to hear; and with this dialogue it's tougher still to understand what he's getting at. In a picture where our good guy has to know how to fly a strange spacecraft, credit a cockamamie plan to save humankind, and be a steadfast Dad who has—somehow—abandoned his children to the dusty prairie and a lousy school system, this does not work.
– Canadian actor Douglas Rain never appeared before the camera in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but anyone who's seen the movie will vividly remember him anyway. Rain provided the voice for the HAL 9000 computer, which eventually turns against the human astronauts when it realizes they intend to disconnect him. "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that," Rain informs astronaut Dave Bowman when Bowman famously asks him to open the pod bay doors (see the movie clip here). Rain has died at age 90, reports the BBC. The news was announced by the Stratford Festival, of which Rain was a founding member. Earlier this year, the New York Times wrote a story about Rain's role in the movie, noting that he wasn't Kubrick's first choice. Kubrick picked Martin Balsam, but he then decided the actor sounded "too colloquially American." He turned instead to Rain after hearing his voice in a 1960 documentary called Universe. "I think he's perfect," Kubrick wrote at the time. "The voice is neither patronizing, nor is it intimidating, nor is it pompous, overly dramatic, or actorish." The article makes the case that Rain's calm cadence has influenced how devices such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Home are heard today—and Anthony Hopkins used it as a model for his Hannibal Lecter. Rain wasn't primarily a voice actor, though: He had a distinguished career on the stage. (See where the movie ranks on a list of sci-fi classics.)