Not Your Average Boarding Calls: The Voice of Iris Lettieri
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When Iris Lettieri started voicing flight messages for Rio de Janeiro’s RIOgaleão International Airport in 1977, she was going for a tone that would put anxious fliers at ease.
“It was the press who labelled it as sexy,” Lettieri told the Globe and Mail, last year, then 72 years old. “It was never meant to be sexy. People tend to think every woman who knows how to place their voice and has a deep voice sounds sexy. I don’t really understand why.”
Despite her protests, the media seems to agree that Lettieri’s breathy boarding calls in Portuguese-accented- English, French, Italian and Russian, are indeed “sultry” and “sensual.” In 1993, the Chicago Tribune even describes her delivery of syllables as a “wet kiss.”
But Lettieri confides in an NPR reporter that aside from Portuguese, she doesn’t speak any of the languages she announces in. Her knack for memorizing the thousands of foreign phrases she records once a month can be attributed to her pianist mother who taught her diction and elocution.
As one of the first female news presenters in Brazil, Lettieri was prominent on the local broadcasting scene of the mid-1980s before being tapped to become the voice of Galeão. Since then, her husky voice, which she denies has been altered by her old two-pack-a-day smoking habit, has become a sensation.
At Galeão, her croon compels waiting passengers to approach the information desk, asking about the voice – some think it’s a man, others believe it’s computer-generated. Like Ursula, the sea-witch from The Little Mermaid, people find Lettieri’s voice so spellbinding they want to capture it. There have been demands for recordings of her boarding calls. A metal band has sampled them. Her voice even had the power to lure Japanese businessmen into some duty-free shopping that caused them to be late for their flight.
Lettieri has received offers to voice this or that including three other airports in Brazil. She opted against promoting Rio’s love motels and to private inquiries from women who want to learn the secrets of honing her sexy voice (breathing from the stomach, hints). But for a sizeable fee, she’s said she would record a greeting for your answering machine.
To hear Iris Lettieri’s boarding calls, click here.