Lunt, Alfred (David)

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, while Billie 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.