What turned out to be, in a sense, a career-making job came along in 1960, when Mr. Rain narrated a Canadian documentary about astronomy and space called “Universe.” It caught Mr. Kubrick’s attention; he is said to have watched it scores of times. 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.

“2001” had already been shot, and various concepts for the voice of HAL had been tried. At one point the computer was envisioned as female. The actor Martin Balsam recorded HAL’s lines but was deemed not quite right. 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. Kubrick had an assistant director, also British, do it.

Mr. Kubrick, not satisfied with any of those, sought out Mr. Rain. They met at a recording studio outside London. Mr. Rain recorded his lines in a day and a half, with Mr. Kubrick, who died in 1999, explaining the scenes to him and giving him only the sparsest of directorial notes.

Mr. 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. His readings were cool to the point of being chilling, especially as the story moved along and HAL became malevolent.