"Doors closing."  A phrase almost 700,000 Bucharest residents hear daily, year after year, without giving it much thought. Behind it is an odd story: the woman whose voice became, in effect, the sound signature of the Bucharest metro didn't know her voice was being used there at all.

Isabela Neamțu was early in her acting career when she went, around 2001, to a voice casting call. She won it, recorded the lines — stations, doors, platforms — and then heard nothing back. No contract signed with Metrorex, no notification, no payment. She barely rode the metro herself, so years went by before she found out what had happened to that voice test. She only learned about it when a colleague told her, one day, that he thought he recognized her voice at a station. Skeptical, Neamțu rode the metro one stop to check with her own ears. Her colleague was right.

That's where a legal battle began, one that would drag on for nearly a decade. In 2007, she sued Metrorex, seeking $170,000 in damages for the unauthorized use of her voice, which by then had been playing daily in every station. She won at first instance in 2011, but both sides appealed, and the case eventually reached Romania's High Court of Cassation and Justice. Eight years after the lawsuit began, on September 29, 2015, the supreme court issued its final ruling: Metrorex had to pay Isabela Neamțu $4,200 and, more importantly to her, lost the right to keep using her voice without consent.

The amount was nowhere near the $170,000 she'd originally sought, and she said as much herself, on her Facebook page, at the time: the sum roughly matched what performers in Romania were typically paid for this kind of rights issue back then, but it wasn't fair compensation for seven years of unauthorized use of a recording. She added, with a kind of wry resignation, that being a pioneer in a case like this is hard.

One lesser-known detail from the case: while the lawsuit was still ongoing, Metrorex had already rolled out, on the newer CAF trains, a different announcement system, using the same audio sequences as on the Bombardier trains — but with a voice the company officially described as "industrial," without a distinct identity. There was, in effect, already a backup version in place, designed to sidestep the same legal problems. At one point, Metrorex also argued that it hadn't even been the right party sued, since the original recording had been commissioned by a third-party firm, SC Metroul SA, the network's design consultant.

After the final ruling, Neamțu confirmed she'd actually received the $4,200 set by the court from Metrorex, plus legal costs — nothing beyond what the court had decided. She also mentioned something worth noting: recordings of her voice kept playing over station speakers for close to another year after the final decision, before disappearing for good. A full year during which a supreme court had already ruled the use illegal, but the system kept running on inertia until new recordings were made.

Today, the actress still works in theater — she's performed at Bulandra Theatre, among other stages — and has taken on other voice work over the years, including dubbing and commercials. She remains best known, though, for the role she never asked for and never signed off on: the most-heard voice in underground Bucharest, in a city where most of the people who hear her every day never found out whose voice it actually was.

Also recommended The smells of the metro: the invisible geography of underground Bucharest