Alfred Lunt

Alfred Lunt was an American actor and director born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on August 12, 1892. Born Alfred David Lunt Jr., he was the son of Alfred David Lunt and Harriet Washburn née Briggs. His father, a prosperous lumberman and land agent, died in 1894, leaving more than $500,000 to the family. His mother gradually lost the inheritance, and the family relocated to Waukesha, where they operated a boarding house. From an early age Lunt was drawn to the theatre, beginning to act in high school and at Carroll College in Waukesha. He transferred to Emerson College in Boston in 1912, though according to his biographer Jared Brown he rarely attended classes, having secured work as a minor actor and assistant stage manager at the Castle Square Theatre. His first professional stage appearance came on October 7, 1912, when he played the Sheriff in The Aviator, and he remained with that 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 subsequently toured with Lillie Langtry, Laura Hope Crews, and Anglin again before making his Broadway debut in 1917 with Crews's company, playing Claude Estabrook in Romance and Arabella. During a summer stock season in Washington, D.C., he met Lynn Fontanne, a rising English actress, and the two fell in love. In 1919, Lunt took on his first significant leading role, playing the title character in Booth Tarkington's comedy Clarence, which ran on Broadway for 323 performances. He and Fontanne married in May 1922, and in 1923 they made their first joint Broadway appearance in a revival of Paul Kester's 1900 costume drama Sweet Nell of Old Drury.

In 1924, the couple joined the Theatre Guild, an organization that, as Brown describes it, staged serious and innovative plays regularly rejected by commercial managements. Their first Guild production together was Ferenc Molnár's The Guardsman, which established their reputation in light comedy. They went on to appear together in three Shaw plays for the Guild: Arms and the Man in 1925, with Lunt as Bluntschli and Fontanne as Raina; Pygmalion in 1926, with Lunt as Higgins and Fontanne as Eliza; and The Doctor's Dilemma in 1927, in which they played the Dubedats. Among Lunt's other early Guild roles were Dmitri Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, Marco Polo in Marco Millions, and Mosca in Volpone. Together, Lunt and Fontanne developed a naturalistic approach to dialogue delivery that was considered groundbreaking, allowing one actor to speak while the other was still speaking, a technique that biographer Brown credited with making their scenes together more vivid and more real than those of other actors.

A turning point in their partnership came in 1928 with Caprice, a production that biographer Margot Peters identifies as the first in which the two performers, rather than the play itself, were the primary draw for audiences. They brought Caprice to London in 1930, marking Lunt's first appearance there, and earned the admiration of audiences, critics, and writers including Shaw and J. B. Priestley. Back in New York, the couple starred in Robert Sherwood's romantic comedy Reunion in Vienna, which opened in November 1931 and ran throughout the season before a nationwide tour. Lunt and Fontanne were committed to touring, bringing their Broadway productions to cities across the United States out of a belief that playwrights deserved wide audiences and that people outside New York deserved access to Broadway-caliber work.

Among Lunt and Fontanne's closest friends was Noël Coward, whom they had met in New York in 1921 when he was a struggling young playwright and actor. The three had agreed at that meeting that when they were all famous, Coward would write a play for all three to star in together. That play became Design for Living in 1932, a comedy in which Fontanne's character moves between the two men before all three end up together. The combination of its risqué subject matter and the popularity of its three stars broke box-office records and reportedly earned the trio the highest salaries paid on Broadway to that time. Coward subsequently wrote Point Valaine for Lunt and Fontanne, which opened in 1934, but it proved to be the only outright failure of the couple's joint career, with its grim plot and unsympathetic characters failing to attract audiences accustomed to seeing the Lunts in glamorous and romantic roles.

For the remainder of the 1930s, Lunt and Fontanne continued working with the Guild in New York and on tour. In 1935 they played Petruchio and Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew. In 1936 they starred in Sherwood's Idiot's Delight, and in 1937 they took the leading roles in S. N. Behrman's adaptation of Jean Giraudoux's Amphitryon 38. In 1938 they played Trigorin and Arkadina in The Seagull on Broadway and toured Amphitryon 38, Idiot's Delight, and The Seagull in repertory across the United States. Lunt also directed throughout his career, staging productions for the Lunts as well as for other companies, including the London production of Reunion in Vienna.

Lunt's Broadway career spanned from 1917 to 1958 and included productions such as I Know My Love, Quadrille, The Great Sebastians, and the Friedrich Dürrenmatt drama The Visit. He received a Tony Award for Best Director in 1954 and a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 1955. Though the Lunts rarely worked in film or television, both received Emmy Awards and were nominated for Academy Awards. Lunt and Fontanne retired from the stage in 1960 and lived at their home in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin. Lunt died on August 3, 1977, and Fontanne died in 1983.