In late August 2008, the original FishbowlLA post relayed a letter from Don LaFontaine’s family. He had been admitted to Cedars-Sinai with shortness of breath, then deteriorated rapidly the next day with a blood clot in his lung. The letter asked for prayers. He died eight days after the letter was sent, and his work has long outlived the obituary cycle.
Then
LaFontaine — the man whose voice had narrated more than 5,000 film trailers, who had recorded for hundreds of thousands of TV promos and commercials, and who had popularized the “In a world…” opening line that defined the trailer-narration genre for two decades — was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in late August 2008 for what initially presented as shortness of breath. His family sent a letter to friends, colleagues, and the wider voiceover community asking for prayers and “concentrated” positive energy on his behalf. The letter, signed by Nita (his wife) and reproduced in full in the original Fishbowl post, was specific: a blood clot had lodged in his lung; he was fighting; there had been “small miracles” of brief improvement; the family was asking the voiceover community to “shout up to God collectively.”
The original Tina Dupuy column was the kind of warm in-community reporting that didn’t try to make the news bigger than it was. It ran the family letter at full length, identified the senders (Jim and Penny, who circulated the appeal), and did not editorialize. The Fishbowl readership for that post in August 2008 was substantially the voiceover and trailer-production community itself — people who knew LaFontaine personally or worked at agencies that had booked him weekly for thirty years.
Don LaFontaine died on September 1, 2008, eight days after the family letter went out.
Now
Eighteen years on, Don LaFontaine’s voice is still the implicit referent every time a trailer-style narration runs. The “In a world…” trope outlived him so completely that it became the title and central joke of Lake Bell’s 2013 directorial debut feature In a World…, a film specifically about voiceover artists competing for the kind of trailer work LaFontaine had dominated, in which his cultural legacy is the entire subtext. The film won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance that year.
The trailer-narration industry itself has been transformed since LaFontaine’s death. The breathy, female-voiced approach that displaced the LaFontaine register in late-2000s and 2010s trailers became the industry default. AI voice synthesis has, in the years since 2023, started encroaching on the entry-level corners of the same business, and the industry conversation about voice rights, performance licensing, and synthetic voice use is now one of the active labor battles in the field. The SAG-AFTRA video-game and voice-acting agreements signed in 2024 explicitly address AI-cloning protections for voiceover work, and LaFontaine’s recordings are sometimes cited in those discussions as the kind of distinctive vocal signature that future agreements need to protect.
LaFontaine’s family — his wife Nita, his daughters — continued to be involved in commemorative projects and in the documentary work surrounding his career. The Voice Arts Awards, which began posthumously in 2014, now annually recognize achievement in voiceover with a Don LaFontaine Legacy Award. The community that the family letter reached in August 2008 is the community that has kept the work alive in his absence.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: September 2009 snapshot