Don LaFontaine, the highly sought-after voice-over artist whose sonorous-voiced narration on several thousand movie trailers earned him the title of "The Trailer King," has died. He was 68.
LaFontaine, who also did voice-over work on countless radio and network television promotional spots and commercials, died Monday of complications after treatment for an illness at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his family said. The illness was not specified.
He was known as "Thunder Throat," "The Voice of God" and "the highest-paid movie-trailer narrator" in Hollywood.
With a rich baritone that was once likened to the sound of someone speaking from the bottom of a well, LaFontaine dramatically narrated the movie trailers for classic films such as "2001: A Space Odyssey" ("A shrieking monolith deliberately buried by an alien intelligence"), "Fatal Attraction" ("A look that led to an evening, a mistake he'd regret all his life") and "The Terminator" ("In the 21st century, a weapon would be invented like no other").
LaFontaine's distinctive voice also was heard on the trailers for "Doctor Zhivago," "MASH," "The Godfather," "Ghostbusters," "Home Alone," "L.A. Confidential," "Independence Day" and nearly 5,000 other movies. He also narrated trailers for the "Indiana Jones," "Rambo" and "Die Hard" series.
"The industry is mourning the loss of a true Hollywood legend," Linda Bell Blue, executive producer of "Entertainment Tonight" and "The Insider," for which LaFontaine was the voice, said in a statement Tuesday.
"Don was not only the reference standard in the voice-over community for his skills, but gave back to all who reached out to him," she said. "Movie trailers and television promos will never be the same."
In a 1995 interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, LaFontaine said, "People think what I do is just like radio announcing, but it's not."
He viewed himself as a voice actor.
"You want to take the audience out of their seats, out of their homes, out of their complacency and pull them into the story," he said. "You want to make that trailer so compelling that they have to go buy a ticket just to find out how the movie ends."
By the early '90s, LaFontaine was so busy -- he once said he could voice about 60 promotions a week and as many as 35 in a day -- that he was saving time by traveling from job to job in a chauffeur-driven limousine. He later began working from a studio in his home, where he received scripts via fax.
