Over the last 40 years Don LaFontaine lent his distinctive, sonorous voice to thousands of feature films. His was the voice on the trailer that characteristically began: “In a world where . . .” The words became a personal catch-phrase and industry standard,and they lured thousands, probably millions, into the story and into cinemas.

Explaining his approach in an interview last year, he said: “We have to very rapidly establish the world we are transporting them to. That’s very easily done by saying, ‘In a world where . . . violence rules,’ ‘In a world where . . . men are slaves and women are the conquerors.’ You very rapidly set the scene.”

He usually wrote his own scripts and he worked on numerous classics and landmark films, from Doctor Zhivago (1965) to Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999). Many hit series called on his special talents, including The Godfather, Indiana Jones, Rambo, Terminator and Die Hard.

But he was probably at his best when pitching unfamiliar storylines. The trailer for Fatal Attraction (1987) was introduced with the words: “A look . . . that led . . . to an evening . . . A mistake . . . he’d regret . . . all his life.” LaFontaine 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.”

His highly dramatic phrasing and rich, baritone delivery entered popular culture and were parodied by comedians and even by himself. He finally emerged onto the screen two years ago in the US in an advert for car insurance, helping dramatise the personal story of a “real person”, beginning: “In a world where both of our cars were totally underwater…”

He was a bald, middle-aged man, with a sandy moustache, standing at a microphone in the real person’s kitchen, translating her comment “With GEICO we had our cheque in two days” into “Payback! (Pause.) This time it’s for real.” The commercial proved a big international hit on the Internet, with more than half a million hits on YouTube.

Variously known as The King of Voice-Overs, The Trailer King, Thunder Throat and The Voice of God, he did not command quite as much as a Hollywood A-List star, but he made a very comfortable living from his work, travelling to engagements in his own personal, chauffeur-driven limousine.

Born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1940, LaFontaine joined the army after high school and worked as a recording engineer with the US Army Band and Chorus. He continued in that line of work at National Recording Studios in New York and worked on the production side of radio commercials for Dr Strangelove (1964) with producer Floyd Peterson.

Subsequently he and Peterson developed a company specialisting in film advertising and LaFontaine stepped in front of the microphone to fill a gap when there was a mix-up and they found themselves short of a voice for a radio commercial for a routine western called Gunfighters Of Casa Grande (1964). it was the beginning of a new and ultimately illustrious career.

He spent several years as a head of production at Kaleidoscope Films, a leading trailer company, and in 1976 he launched his own company Don LaFontaine Associates. One of his first assignments as an independent was The Godfather Part II (1974). He made the rather clumsy title and a list of Oscars sound not so much like a simple Part II as an account of the Second Coming itself, ringing every possible drop of passion from the fact that the film had won an award for “best art direction and set decoration”.

In 1978 he joined Paramount Pictures (the company behind the Godfather films) as head of their in-house trailer department. In 1980 he was promoted to vice-president, but he left the following year to resume his career as an independent producer and voice-over artist.

As well as around 5,000 films he also claimed to have worked on hundreds of thousands of spots for television and radio and voiced commercials for Chevrolet, Ford, Budweiser, Coca-Cola and McDonalds. His own website says: “Based on contracts signed, he has the distinction of being perhaps the single busiest actor in the history of SAG (the American acting union).” In the early 1990s he was voicing as many as 35 spots in a day, hence the need for the chauffeur-driven car to save time. Later he worked from a studio in his home and had scripts sent to him.

He told one interviewer: “I came into the field of movie promos just as it was being born. I had the opportunity to work in virtually every style, mostly reading copy that I had written or co-written. Many of the younger narrators of today grew up hearing me. And right or wrong, it became a sort of template for how trailers should be read.”

LaFontaine, who died after complications in the treatment of an ongoing illness, is survived by his wife Nita Whitaker, an actress and singer, and three daughters.

Don LaFontaine, voice-over artist, was born on August 26, 1940. He died on September 1, 2008, aged 68