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Art Gilmore, whose disembodied voice, introducing television shows and narrating hundreds (if not thousands) of movie trailers, was a trademark of Hollywood’s self-salesmanship from the 1940s through the 1960s, died Sept. 25 in Irvine, Calif.

He was 98. He died of age-related causes, said his wife, Grace.

Mr. Gilmore actually did some acting on television, playing full-bodied parts in shows like “Dragnet,” “Emergency!” and “Adam 12.” But for most moviegoers and television watchers of a certain age, Mr. Gilmore was a star without a name or a face; he was even cast as a never-seen radio announcer in several episodes of “The Waltons.”

His voice — crisp and articulate, just a tad piercing, cagily pitched to the subject matter and inflected with a precisely calibrated measure of enthusiasm — was as recognizable as a theme song.

As the narrator of countless movie trailers (his wife estimated he did 3,000), Mr. Gilmore was an especially effective pitchman, delivering the language of hype with masterful conviction. Comedies, thrillers, romances, musicals, animation, documentaries — it didn’t matter.

Among the films Mr. Gilmore promoted as coming attractions were “Dumbo,” “A Place in the Sun,” “Roman Holiday,” “Shane,” “Born Yesterday,” “Rear Window,” “South Pacific,” “War and Peace,” “Ocean’s 11,” “White Christmas” and “Bye Bye Birdie.”

“The screen jumps for joy with Glendon Swarthout’s inside story of those uproarious Easter vacations,” Mr. Gilmore pronounced in the trailer for “Where the Boys Are,” a 1960 comedy about college girls on the make.

“Never before has any film contained such a full measure of the joy of living,” he asserted in the trailer for Frank Capra’s life-affirming small-town tale from 1946, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

For the 1953 science-fiction thriller “The War of the Worlds” he declared: “This could be the beginning of the end for the human race!”

And in a virtuosic bit of melodramatic recitation, he described Alfred Hitchcock’s loopy and masterful psychodrama “Vertigo” (1958) as “the story of a love so powerful it broke through all the barriers between past and present, between life and death, between the golden girl in the dark tower and the tawdry redhead that he tried to remake in her image.”

Among many other television appearances, Mr. Gilmore was the announcer on “The Red Skelton Show” — “Live! From Television City in Hollywood!” — from 1954 to 1971. He was an announcer of the mid-1950s dramatic anthology series “Climax”; he narrated all 39 episodes of the late 1950s western series “Mackenzie’s Raiders.” And from 1955 to 1959, he narrated the crime series “Highway Patrol,” which starred Broderick Crawford.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Marilyn Gilmore, of Irvine, and Barbara McCoy, of Rockford, Ill., two grandchildren and four great grandchildren.