![]() The American Film Institute once listed the 50 greatest movie villains. ![]() “Standard Canadian English sounds ‘normal’ - that’s why Canadians are well received in the United States as anchormen and reporters, because the vowels don’t give away the region they come from.” “You have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place,” he once said. Kubrick was often attributed to the dialect his voice generally fell into, something called Standard Canadian English.Ī University of Toronto linguistics professor, Jack Chambers, once explained the appeal. “Actually, it came off as very impressive on the screen.” Rain recalled “Universe,” the documentary that led to his “2001” fame.“It was a very low-budget affair with Ping-Pong balls, and the sun, as I recall, was played by a tomato,” he said. He is survived by two sons, David and Adam a daughter, Emma Rain and a granddaughter.In a 1981 interview with the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, Mr. Rain’s marriages to Lois Shaw and Martha Henry ended in divorce. But his sons, in an email received after this obituary was published, expressed doubt about that claim, saying he had never spoken to them about such a role. Rain was the voice of the computer in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” in 1973. He was also seen in numerous television shows and several other movies, including “2010: The Year We Made Contact,” a sequel to “2001” in which he reprised the role of HAL. His performance in “Vivat! Vivat Regina!” in 1972 earned him a Tony Award nomination as best featured actor in a play. Rain, in the role of Henry, Prince of Wales, “performs with a youthful dash in the early scenes and then turns gallant in the later ones with equal fervor.” Howard Taubman, reviewing “Henry IV, Part 1” at Stratford in 1965 for The New York Times, said that Mr. Within a few years he was playing major roles there, including Iago in “Othello” in 1959, the title role in “King John” in 1960 and Edgar in “King Lear” in 1964. He also spent a year at the Old Vic School in London before returning to Canada to join the fledgling Stratford Festival. He studied at the University of Manitoba, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1950, and the Banff Center for the Arts. His readings were cool to the point of being chilling, especially as the story moved along and HAL became malevolent. Siri - The Personal Assistant on your Phone This demo also shows Siri behaving in an open-ended manner, understanding that a conversation evolves when you’re planning an eventand it. Rain’s rendition of the lines (“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”) was dispassionate in a way that was both soothing and unsettling. Kubrick, who died in 1999, explaining the scenes to him and giving him only the sparsest of directorial notes. Rain recorded his lines in a day and a half, with Mr. They met at a recording studio outside London. Kubrick, not satisfied with any of those, sought out Mr. Kubrick had an assistant director, also British, do it. During filming, the British actor Nigel Davenport read the lines off-camera for a time for the benefit of Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, who played the astronauts, and then Mr. The actor Martin Balsam recorded HAL’s lines but was deemed not quite right. At one point the computer was envisioned as female. “2001” had already been shot, and various concepts for the voice of HAL had been tried. And when he was having trouble finding a voice that he liked for HAL 9000 - the onboard computer on a spaceship carrying astronauts on a mysterious mission - he thought of the documentary’s narration. Kubrick’s attention he is said to have watched it scores of times. Rain narrated a Canadian documentary about astronomy and space called “Universe.” It caught Mr. Commas, Zeros and No.What turned out to be, in a sense, a career-making job came along in 1960, when Mr.Here’s one from the “think different” era: Of course, long before Siri made the scene, YouTubers were conflating Kubrick’s movie with Jobs’s ads. Assume that will happen here as well, so if/when it does, try this one): Here’s HAL’s most famous scene (sorry for the quality - there are a bunch of better versions on YouTube but all of those have had the embed function disabled. It would remind way too many people of HAL 9000, Stanley Kubrick’s homicidal computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In lieu of that, I’ll throw out my own Occam’s Razor response: There’s no way Apple or anyone else can offer an artificial intelligence service that speaks with a male voice. (UPDATE: John Paczkowski, who was on the ground for the iPhone 4S unveiling, says Siri sounds like “standard Apple text-to-speech female voice.” Pressed for a one-word description, John offers up this one: “Macplaymate?”) Love to hear Apple’s answer, if any of the reporters in Cupertino feels like asking. Siri, the new virtual assistant who comes packaged with every iPhone 4S, talks to users in a woman’s voice.
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