#(like hello aso fandom may i perhaps interest you in other random media on this fine day which is douglas rain's BIRTHDAY)

[douglas-rain]

Happy Birthday to Douglas Rain!

Today would have been the 96th birthday of Canadian actor Douglas Rain, born 9 May 1928.

[Pictured: A press photo of DR for the 1958 season of the Stratford Festival of Canada, where he could be seen performing the role of Prince Hal (no, not that one) in Henry IV, Part One and the Young Shepherd in The Winter's Tale.]

Of course, Douglas Rain is mostly remembered these days for providing the voice of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I'd like to invite you all to join me today and take a little tour through the rest of his work, a selection of which I have managed to track down over the past few months. We've got documentaries, radio dramas, TV movies and of course stage plays!

It's a very incomplete collection (one day I will raid the CBC and find out where they're hiding all the radio work DR has done, mark my words), but it currently includes highlights such as

King Henry V from the Shakespeare play of the same name, who spends most of the runtime going through every emotion known to man (and a few more we had never seen before)

Dunstan Ramsay, the protagonist of Fifth Business and the human embodiment of the phrase "sure, why not?"

Orgon from Tartuffe, who is just. The dumbest bitch you've ever seen

That moment from the narration for The Man Who Skied Down Everest where, after an hour and fifteen minutes of calm and soothing monologue, DR suddenly starts mumbling and I Have Never Been More Scared In My Life

And many more!

[Pictured: DR in the 1966 TV broadcast production of Henry V, the 1968 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (both with the Stratford Festival) and the 1969 London production of Hadrian VII.]

Btw if you've seen his birthday listed as 13 March anywhere, ignore it. Here's the article I wrote detailing my descent into madness trying to figure out which date is the real one, but the tl;dr is that it's 9 May according to writer and former NFB producer Gerry Flahive, who emailed Mr Rain's ex-wife Martha Henry about it in 2018. Anyway.