Regardless of whether your taste in film runs to blockbusters, independent fare or even artsy foreign films, you know Don LaFontaine's voice. In fact, no matter whose face you've seen most often at your neighborhood theatre, LaFontaine's is the voice you've heard the most. In the course of his forty-year career, he did so many voice-overs for television and film -- rising to his pinnacle of fame as "The 'In a World' Guy' due to that phrase's numbing regularity in movie trailers -- that he became known in the industry as the Voice of God.
It was not only the quality of LaFontaine's work, with its steady, rich, almost commanding tone, that made him a success; it was also its regularity. Starting in the mid-1960s, he embarked on an amazingly productive career that saw him voice the narration for over 3,000 television shows, an incredible 5,000 movies, and an absolutely mind-bending 350,000 commercials. LaFontaine also maintained a good sense of humor about his work, parodying his role as the Voice of God in nearly a dozen places, from Family Guy to Arrested Development. In a profile a few years ago on 60 Minutes, a day in the life of Don LaFontaine saw him knocking out as many as 75 voice-over jobs in a single day's work, and doing so in, to invoke a phrase rarely applied correctly in today's Hollywood, a consummately professional manner.
LaFontaine suffered a collapsed lung several months ago and never recovered; he passed away yesterday of complications from pneumothorax. It's hard to imagine what movie trailers will be like without him; so omnipresent was he as a cultural voice that things seem eerily silent in his absence.