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Alfred Lunt
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Lunt and Fontanne |
| American Theater Guide: 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: Alfred and Lynn Fontanne 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).
Dictionary:
Lunt (lŭnt)  , Alfred
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American actor who performed with his wife Lynn Fontanne in many stage productions, including Pygmalion (1926) and Quadrille (1952-1955).
| Actor: Alfred Lunt |
- Born: Aug 19, 1893 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
- Died: Aug 03, 1977 in Chicago, Illinois
- Occupation: Actor
- Active: '20s, '40s
- Major Genres: Comedy, Romance
- Career Highlights: Sally of the Sawdust, The Guardsman, The Ragged Edge
- First Major Screen Credit: Backbone (1923)
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, All Movie Guide| Filmography: Alfred Lunt |
| Wikipedia: Alfred Lunt |
| Alfred Lunt | |
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 photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932 |
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| Born | Alfred Davis Lunt, Jr. 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(s) | Lynn Fontanne (1922-1977) |
Alfred Lunt (August 12, 1892 – August 3, 1977) was an American stage director and actor, often identified for an incomparable, 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 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". [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.
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 pre-Revolutionary Maine and Massachusetts stock.[citation needed] 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 Noel 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 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.
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)
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 | Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| American Theater Guide. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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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)
- Marco Millions (American Theater)
- Ned McCobb's Daughter (American Theater)
- The Pirate (American Theater)
- The Second Man (American Theater)
- There Shall be No Night (American Theater)
- Sidney Franklin (Actor, Drama/Western)
- The Guardsman (1931 Comedy Film)
- The Magnificent Yankee (1950 Drama Film)
- Backbone (1923 Film)
