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; his death) |
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 [edit]
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 play, 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]
Personal life [edit]
Alfred Davis Lunt, Jr. was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1892[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. His father was descendant of Henry Lunt, an early settler of Newbury, Massachusetts.[3]
His mother had 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, Wisconsin.
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. Secure in their public image as a happily married couple, they could play 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 more than twenty plays. They also appeared posthumously on an American postage stamp. The couple 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.[citation needed]
In 1964, Lunt and Fontanne were presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.
Death [edit]
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, nine days before his 85th birthday, in Chicago from cancer. He is buried next to his wife at the Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee.
Selected Broadway stage work [edit]
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Selected film and TV appearances [edit]
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Radio Appearances [edit]
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, 09/30/1945, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne
- Elizabeth the Queen, 12/02/1945, Lunt, Fontanne
- Neb Cobb's Daughter, 12/09/45, Alfred Lunt, Shirley Booth
- The Second Man, 02/03/1946, Lunt, Peggy Conklin, Jessie Royce Landis
- The Show Off, 03/03/1946, Lunt, Betty Garde, Helen Shields
- Call it a Day, 06/02/1946, Lunt, Fontanne
- The Great Adventure. A Play of Fancy in Four Acts, 01/05/1947, Lunt, Fontanne
- O Mistress Mine, 01/09/1949, Lunt, Fontanne (presumed lost)
- The Great Adventure (second performance), 11/20/1949, Lunt, Fontanne (presumed lost)
- There Shall Be No Night, 09/24/1950, Lunt, Fontanne (presumed lost)
- Pygmalion, 10/21/1951, Lunt, Fontanne
Sources [edit]
References [edit]
- ^ Harold Clurman. The Collected Works. Ed. Marjory Loggia and Glenn Young. (New York: Applause Books, 1994): p. 890.
- ^ "Birth Record Details". Wisconsin Historical Society. 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 [edit]
- 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. Retrieved September 3, 2010.
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