Alfred Lunt

Alfred David Lunt was born on August 12, 1892, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and died on August 3, 1977. He worked as an actor and director, but is most famous for the stage partnership he shared with his wife, Lynn Fontanne. From the 1920s until 1960, they starred together in productions on Broadway and in London’s West End. After they married, they almost never performed apart. Audiences and critics on both sides of the Atlantic knew them simply as “the Lunts.”

Though they took on classics like *The Taming of the Shrew*, *The Seagull*, and *Pygmalion*, as well as a dark comedy by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the Lunts were especially admired for their polished work in light comedies by Noël Coward, S. N. Behrman, and Terence Rattigan, and in romantic plays by writers such as Robert E. Sherwood. Lunt also directed some of their joint productions and staged plays for other companies. They rarely acted in film or television, but each won an Emmy Award, and one received an Academy Award nomination.

The Lunts retired from the stage in 1960 and lived at their home in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin. Lunt died in 1977; Fontanne died in 1983.

**Life and career**

**Early years**

Alfred David Lunt Jr. was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on August 12, 1892, to Alfred David Lunt and Harriet Washburn Briggs. His father, a successful lumberman and land agent, died in 1894, leaving over $500,000 to the family. His mother, described as eccentric and strong-willed, gradually lost all the money, and the family moved to Waukesha, where they ran a boarding house. From a young age, Lunt was fascinated by theater. He started acting in high school and at Carroll College in Waukesha. Thinking about becoming an architect, he transferred to Emerson College in Boston in 1912. According to his biographer Jared Brown, Lunt “rarely attended classes, having found a job as a minor actor and assistant stage manager with the Castle Square Theatre in Boston.” He made his first professional stage appearance there on October 7, 1912, playing the Sheriff in *The Aviator*, and stayed with the stock company for two years.

In 1914, Lunt toured with Margaret Anglin in *Beverley’s Balance*, staying with her company for eighteen months and appearing in *Green Stockings*, *As You Like It*, *Iphigenia in Tauris*, and *Medea*. He then toured with Lillie Langtry, Laura Hope Crews, and Anglin again. In 1917, he made his Broadway debut with Crews’s company, playing Claude Estabrook in *Romance and Arabella*. After that, he performed in a summer stock season in Washington, D.C., where he met Lynn Fontanne, a rising young English actress. They fell in love, though Lunt’s courtship was at first more hesitant than Fontanne would have liked.

In 1919, Lunt landed his first major leading role: the title part in Booth Tarkington’s comedy *Clarence*, which ran on Broadway for 323 performances. He married Fontanne in May 1922, and in 1923 they appeared together on Broadway for the first time, in a revival of Paul Kester’s 1900 costume drama *Sweet Nell of Old Drury*.

**Theatre Guild**

In 1924, the Lunts joined the Theatre Guild. As Brown describes it, the Guild “staged plays on Broadway but defied Broadway conventions by offering serious and innovative plays that were regularly rejected by commercial managements.” Their first Guild production together was Ferenc Molnár’s *The Guardsman*, in which they built a reputation for light comedy. They acted together in three Shaw plays: *Arms and the Man* (as Bluntschli and Raina, 1925), *Pygmalion* (as Higgins and Eliza, 1926), and *The Doctor’s Dilemma* (as the Dubedats, 1927). Other early Guild roles for Lunt included Dmitri Karamazov in *The Brothers Karamazov*, Marco Polo in *Marco Millions*, and Mosca in *Volpone*.

Lunt and Fontanne introduced a naturalistic new way of delivering dialogue, building on a technique Fontanne had started exploring when she acted with Laurette Taylor. It was unheard of for an actor to speak while another was still speaking, but, in Brown’s words, the result was that the Lunts’ scenes together could be “more vivid, more real than those of other actors.”

In 1928, the Lunts co-starred in *Caprice*, an unusually light comedy for the Guild. Biographer Margot Peters calls the production a milestone for two reasons: it was the first time the Lunts themselves, rather than the play, were the main attraction, and it marked the start of their inseparable partnership—from then on, they always appeared together. They took *Caprice* to London in 1930—Lunt’s first appearance there—and won admiration from audiences, critics, and writers including Shaw and J. B. Priestley. For the Guild in New York, the Lunts starred in Robert Sherwood’s romantic comedy *Reunion in Vienna*, which opened in November 1931 and ran through the season, followed by a nationwide tour. They strongly believed in touring, taking many of their Broadway hits to remote locations as well as larger American cities. They felt a double responsibility: to let playwrights reach as many people as possible, and to give audiences outside New York a chance to see Broadway productions.

**Design for Living**

Among the Lunts’ closest friends was Noël Coward. The three met in New York in 1921, when Coward was a struggling young playwright and actor. They agreed that when they were all famous, Coward would write a play for the three of them to star in. The Lunts’ marriage was the subject of much speculation.