Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne

Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne , 1887?-1983, b. Essex, England, American acting couple. Lunt made his debut in Boston (1913), toured in vaudeville, and won fame in Booth Tarkington's Clarence in 1919. Fontanne made her London debut in 1905 and her first appearance in New York City in 1910. The couple were married in 1922 and appeared together (1924-29) in many Theatre Guild productions, including The Guardsman and Pygmalion. The Lunts first appeared in London in Caprice in 1929. They excelled especially in sophisticated modern comedy, such as Noël Coward's Design for Living (1933), Robert Sherwood's Idiot's Delight (1936), and Terence Rattigan's Love in Idleness (1944-49). The Lunts also played in weightier dramas, including There Shall Be No Night (1940) and The Visit (1957-60), their last joint appearance, and performed together in films and television plays.

Bibliography: See biographies by J. Brown (1986) and M. Peters (2003).

Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, New York, on West 46th Street. This attractive playhouse was opened as the Globe in 1910, mainly for musical shows, though at the end of the year the company of Sarah Bernhardt appeared in a repertory of French plays. The Ziegfeld Follies were there in 1921 and George White's Scandals in 1922 and 1923. After a successful musical, The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), it became a cinema; but in 1958, completely remodelled and redecorated, with a seating capacity of 1,714, it reopened as the Lunt-Fontanne with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Dürrenmatt's The Visit. From 9 Apr. to 8 Aug. 1964 Richard Burton appeared in Hamlet, setting up a new record for the run of the play in New York. In the 1970s the theatre staged revivals of the musicals My Fair Lady (1976), Hello, Dolly! (1978), and Peter Pan (1979). In 1981 it had another success with Sophisticated Ladies, a compilation of Duke Ellington numbers. It housed revivals of Coward's Private Lives in 1983, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh in 1985 with Jason Robards.