Lunt, Alfred, 1892-1977

Alfred Davis Lunt Jr. (August 12, 1892 – August 3, 1977) was an American stage director and actor who had a long-time professional partnership with his wife, actress Lynn Fontanne. Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theatre was named for them. 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.

Lunt was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1892 to Alfred D. Lunt and Harriet Washburn Briggs. 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 included the Earl of Essex in Maxwell Anderson's Elizabeth the Queen, 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 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 and his wife Lynn Fontanne, whom he married on May 26, 1922, in New York City, were the pre-eminent Broadway acting couple. 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 ménage à trois in Noël Coward's Design for Living. (The latter, 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 it would not survive the censor in London.) The Lunts appeared together in more than 20 plays. They also were featured posthumously on an American postage stamp.

The couple made three films together: Second Youth (1924), The Guardsman (1931), in which they starred, and Stage Door Canteen (1943) in which they had cameos as themselves. In 1958, they retired from the stage. They starred in several radio dramas for the Theatre Guild in the 1940s and starred in a few television productions in the 1950s and 1960s. Summers, during their days of performing on stage and their retirement years, were spent at their home Ten Chimneys in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin.In 1964, Lunt and Fontanne were presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, and both are represented in the American Theatre Hall of Fame.

Alfred Lunt died August 3, 1977 in Chicago from cancer. He is buried next to his wife at Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was the third person for whom the house lights were dimmed in all Broadway theaters following his death.