A couple of obituaries I should have mentioned

Two lesser-known names whose work you'd recognize even if you didn't know their names or faces died last week, and both of them deserve mention:

First is Francis Lai, who died last Wednesday at the age of 86. Lai was a composer, which is why you wouldn't recognize the face and might not remember the name. But he composed a couple of very famous movie themes, notably A Man and a Woman in 1966, and his Oscar-winning theme for Love Story in 1970.

Then there's Douglas Rain, who died on Sunday aged 90. He was mostly a stage actor, who founded the famous Stratford festival in Canada, but the role he'll be most remembered for is far from Shakespeare. In the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rain provided the voice for the HAL 9000 computer that ran the ship the astronauts were taking to Jupiter, only to try to kill the astronauts after they thought the computer was malfunctioning. "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." The movie goes seriously downhill after HAL leaves the scene.