David Bowman

Bowman and Poole take turns staying awake while three colleagues travel in hibernation. He sketches, eats, watches messages from Earth and gives a TV interview with the calm of someone at an office job.

When HAL flags a fault in the AE-35 unit, Bowman goes out in a pod, swaps the part and finds nothing wrong with it. That's where the doubts about HAL begin. His voice barely changes, even when the mission starts going wrong. Kubrick holds long stretches with nothing but Bowman's breathing inside the suit.

Poole dies outside, and Bowman rushes out to recover the body without his helmet. On the way back, HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors.

Bowman lets the body go, lines the pod up with the emergency airlock and blows himself through the vacuum to get inside. He goes straight to HAL's brain and shuts him down, module by module. Then a recording of Heywood Floyd plays, revealing what was really behind the mission. It's the biggest risk he takes in the film: seconds in the vacuum, no helmet, until the door shuts and the air comes back.

Alone, Bowman reaches Jupiter and spots another monolith floating in space. He goes out in the pod, and the monolith pulls him into a tunnel of light and color.

He ends up in a room decorated in 18th-century style. He sees himself older, eating dinner, then very old, in bed, with the monolith at its foot. He's reborn as a glowing fetus, the Star Child, floating above Earth. The film never explains any of this in words. The clue it leaves is the Strauss music, which returns at the end, the same piece from the opening.

Nine years later, Bowman is listed as missing. He comes back as a presence with no body. He appears on the TV of his widow, Betty, and visits his ailing mother.

On Discovery, he appears to Heywood Floyd and warns him the crew must leave Jupiter. He says something wonderful is going to happen. At the end, he's the one who asks HAL to beam the message to Earth. Bowman doesn't explain what he's become or who sent him. He just says what's coming and fades away.

Keir Dullea played Bowman in both movies, 16 years apart.