Alfred Lunt
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
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Lunt and Fontanne
U.S. acting team. Alfred Lunt (b. Aug. 19, 1892, Milwaukee, Wis., U.S.d. Aug. 3, 1977, Chicago, Ill.) made his acting debut in Boston in 1912 and starred in Clarence on Broadway (1919). Lynn Fontanne (orig. Lillie Louise Fontanne; b. Dec. 6, 1887, Essex, Eng.d. July 30, 1983, Genesee Depot, Wis., U.S.) made her acting debut in London in 1909 and in New York City in 1910. She and Lunt married in 1922 and performed with the Theatre Guild from 1924 to 1929. They acted together in more than 25 plays, including The Guardsmen (1924) and Design for Living (1933), the latter of which Nol Coward wrote for them. Considered the foremost acting couple of the U.S. theatre, they were acclaimed for the subtlety and effortless cooperation of their performances, especially in comedies by Coward and George Bernard Shaw.
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Oxford Companion to American Theatre:
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Alfred [David] Lunt
Lunt, Alfred [David] (1892–1980), actor and director. Considered by many the greatest leading man of his generation, he was born in Milwaukee and educated at Carroll College. He abandoned his early ambition to become an architect and made his theatrical debut with the Castle Square Theatre stock company in Boston in 1912, then toured with Lillie Langtry and Margaret Anglin. Broadway first saw him in Romance and Arabella (1917), but it was his performance as the shy, bumbling young man, Clarence (1919), that brought him important recognition. In 1922 he married Lynn Fontanne and rarely thereafter performed without her. Three of his few noteworthy assignments alone was as Mr. Prior, the boozy, newly dead young man, in Outward Bound (1924); the flashy bootlegger Babe Callahan in Ned McCobb's Daughter (1926); and Marco Polo in Marco Millions (1928). The Lunts' first great triumph together was in The Guardsman (1924), followed by The Second Man (1927), The Doctor's Dilemma (1927), Elizabeth the Queen (1930), Reunion in Vienna (1931), Design for Living (1933), The Taming of the Shrew (1935), Idiot's Delight (1936), Amphitryon 38 (1937), The Seagull (1938), There Shall Be No Night, (1940); and The Pirate (1942). The Lunts spent the rest of the war years playing in England, returning to appear in a series of competent, but often indifferent comedies: O Mistress Mine (1946), I Know My Love (1949), Quadrille (1954), and The Great Sebastians (1956). Only with their farewell play, The Visit (1958), did they again find a worthy drama. Lunt occasionally directed plays, such as Candle in the Wind (1941) and Ondine (1954). In her autobiography, Theresa Helburn suggested that there was “always something tortured” in his manner, that, in effect, he never totally stopped playing the timorous, befuddled Clarence, whileBillie Burke in her memoirs recalled “his distinguished voice . . . and his luminous brown eyes, with their always‐startled expression.” John Mason Brown wrote of the Lunts' teamwork, “They are shrewd judges of what to underscore and what to throw away. They realize that the very act of seeming to throw a phrase or a word away is in itself a form of emphasis. They are no less adroit in altering the tempo of their separate scenes than they are in changing the pace of their single sentences. What is more, their watches are always synchronized.” Biography: The Fabulous Lunts, Jared Brown, 1986.
Columbia Encyclopedia:
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Alfred [David] Lunt
Lunt, Alfred, 1893-1977, b. Milwaukee, and Lynn Fontanne (fŏntăn'), 1887?-1983, b. Essex, England, American acting couple. Lunt made his debut in Boston (1913), toured in vaudeville, and won fame in Booth Tarkington's Clarence in 1919. Fontanne made her London debut in 1905 and her first appearance in New York City in 1910. The couple were married in 1922 and appeared together (1924-29) in many Theatre Guild productions, including The Guardsman and Pygmalion. The Lunts first appeared in London in Caprice in 1929. They excelled especially in sophisticated modern comedy, such as Noël Coward's Design for Living (1933), Robert Sherwood's Idiot's Delight (1936), and Terence Rattigan's Love in Idleness (1944-49). The Lunts also played in weightier dramas, including There Shall Be No Night (1940) and The Visit (1957-60), their last joint appearance, and performed together in films and television plays.
Bibliography
See biographies by J. Brown (1986) and M. Peters (2003).
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, Alfred 1893-1977.American actor who performed with his wife Lynn Fontanne in many stage productions, including Pygmalion (1926) and Quadrille (1952-1955).
AMG AllMovie Guide:
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Alfred Lunt
Biography
One of America's foremost stage actors, Alfred Lunt made his debut with a Boston stock company in 1912. He first set foot on a Broadway stage in 1917, and two years later scored his first significant success as the title character in Clarence. In 1922, he married British actress Lynn Fontanne, and for the next 35 years the team of Lunt and Fontanne reigned supreme along the Great White Way. Their string of stage successes included Amphytrion 38, Idiots' Delight, and The Visit, not to mention their sublime collaborations with actor/playwright Noel Coward (Private Lives, Design for Living). By nature and inclination a stage actor, Lunt made only a handful of film appearances, most of them during the silent era; one of his least characteristic film roles was in D.W. Griffith's Sally of the Sawdust, in which he played third fiddle to Carol Dempster and W.C. Fields. Outside of a guest appearance in 1943's Stage Door Canteen, Lunt and Fontanne appeared together onscreen only once, in a 1931 adaptation of their stage success The Guardsman, for which they both received Academy Award nominations. After his retirement, Alfred Lunt lived the life of a gentleman farmer in Genessee Depot, WI, occasionally phoning a Milwaukee radio talk show to offer gratis gardening tips to other listeners. ~ Hal Erickson, RoviFilmography:
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Alfred Lunt
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Alfred Lunt
| Alfred Lunt | |
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 photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932 |
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| Born | August 12, 1892 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. |
| Died | August 3, 1977 (aged 84) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor/Director |
| Years active | 1923–1966 |
| Spouse | Lynn Fontanne (1922-1977) |
Alfred Lunt (August 12, 1892 – August 3, 1977) was an American stage director and actor, often identified for a long-time professional partnership with his wife, actress Lynn Fontanne. Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theatre was named for them.
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Career
Lunt received two Tony Awards, an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for 1931's The Guardsman and an Emmy Award for the Hallmark Hall of Fame's production of The Magnificent Yankee. He became a star in 1919 as the buffoonish lead in Booth Tarkington's Clarence, but soon distinguished himself in a variety of roles. The roles ranged from the Earl of Essex in Maxwell Anderson's Elizabeth the Queen, to a song-and-dance man touring the Balkans in Robert E. Sherwood's Idiot's Delight, a megalomaniacal tycoon in S. N. Behrman's Meteor and Jupiter himself in Jean Giraudoux's Amphitryon 38. His appearances in classical drama were infrequent, but he scored successes in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Chekhov's The Seagull (in which Lunt played Trigorin, his wife played Arkadina, and Uta Hagen made her Broadway debut in the role of Nina). He was described by director and critic Harold Clurman as "universally acclaimed the finest American actor in the generation which followed John Barrymore; the Lunts are absolute angels." [1]
Lunt had a very distinctive stage technique; among other traits, in almost every one of his roles he made a point of playing at least one protracted sequence with his back to the audience, conveying his character's emotions with his voice and body rather than his face.
In 1964, Alfred Lunt and his wife, Lynn Fontanne, were presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.
Selected Broadway stage work
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Selected film and TV appearances
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Radio Appearances
The Lunts made multiple appearances on the radio series Theater Guild on the Air (also known as "United States Steel Hour"). These programs are hour-long adaptations of famous plays. The couple performed together eight times on the program, and each appeared three times without the other. Recordings of most of these episodes still exist unless noted presumed lost.
- The Guardsman 09-30-45 - Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne
- Elizabeth the Queen" 12-02-45 - Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne
- Neb Cobb's Daughter 12-09-45 Alfred Lunt, Shirley Booth
- The Second Man 02-03-46 Alfred Lunt, Peggy Conklin, Jessie Royce Landis
- The Show Off 03-03-46 Alfred Lunt, Betty Garde, Helen Shields
- Call it a Day 06-02-46 Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne
- The Great Adventure 01-05-47 Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne
- O Mistress Mine 01-09-49 Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne (presumed lost)
- The Great Adventure (second performance) 11-20-49 Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne (presumed lost).
- There Shall Be No Night 09-24-50 Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne (presumed lost).
- Pygmalion 10-21-51 Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne
Personal life
Alfred Davis Lunt, Jr. was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin[2] to Alfred D. Lunt and Harriet Washburn Briggs. With the exception of his paternal grandmother, who was of Scottish descent, his ancestors were of colonial Maine and Massachusetts stock. Alfred's father was descendant of Henry Lunt, an early settler of Newbury, Massachusetts.[3] His mother has several New England ancestors including Mayflower arrivals. After his father, who was in the lumber business, died in 1893, Alfred's mother remarried a Finnish-born physician, Dr. Karl Sederholm, and had another son and two daughters. The Sederholms eventually moved to Genesee Depot, in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. Lunt later attended Carroll College in nearby Waukesha.
Along with his wife Lynn Fontanne, whom he married on May 26, 1922, in New York City, he was half of the pre-eminent Broadway acting couple of American history, having the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway named in their honor. Celebrated for their sophisticated comic skills, they were known for their ability to swiftly overlap dialogue with such adroitness that every word was understood. Secure in their public image as a happily married couple, they sometimes titillated audiences by playing adulterers, as in Robert Sherwood's Reunion in Vienna, or as part of a menage a trois in Noël Coward's Design for Living. (In fact, Design for Living, written for the Lunts, was so risqué, with its theme of bisexuality and a ménage à trois, that Coward premiered it in New York, knowing that it would not survive the censor in London.) The Lunts appeared together in over 24 plays - and most recently on an American postage stamp. The couple also made one film together (The Guardsman 1931), starred in several radio dramas for the Theatre Guild in the 1940s and starred in a few television productions in the 1950s and 1960s. They retired in 1966.
Ten Chimneys, Alfred and Lynn's estate in Genesee Depot, located in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, is now a house museum and resource center for theater.
Alfred Lunt died August 3, 1977, from cancer and is buried next to his wife at the Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee.
Sources
References
- ^ Harold Clurman. The Collected Works. Ed. Marjory Loggia and Glenn Young. (New York: Applause Books, 1994): 890.
- ^ "Birth Record Details". Wisconsin Historical Society. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/vitalrecords/index.asp?id=2878783&record_type=b. Retrieved 2009-07-23.
- ^ Lunt, T.S. [1914] Lunt: a history of the Lunt family in America Salem Press Co. (via Internet Archive) pg. 90, Alfred #1036
External links
- Alfred Lunt at the Internet Broadway Database
- Alfred Lunt at the Internet Movie Database
- Every, Carolyn N. "Home life of the Lunts," Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 66, no. 3 (1982–1983)
- "Alfred Lunt". Find a Grave. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=654. Retrieved September 3, 2010.
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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2012 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
Oxford Companion to American Theatre
The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Columbia Encyclopedia
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.
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American Heritage Dictionary
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Mentioned in
Fontanne, Lynn
(British-born American actress)
Edith Roberts
(Actor, Drama/Romance)
Hugh Huntley
(Actor, Drama/Romance)
Clarence
(American Theater)
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
(American theater)
» More