Fontanne, Lynn

(1887-1983)

   Born in England, Lillie Louise Fontanne debuted at the age of 17 in Cinderella (1905) after studying acting with the great Victorian star Ellen Terry. Fontanne's American debut came five years later in the innocuous Mr. Preedy and the Countess (1910), after which she returned to England. In 1916, she returned to the United States to appear with her future husband, Alfred Lunt, in A Young Man's Fancy (1916). Shortly before their marriage in 1922, Fontanne scored a personal success as the meddling title character of George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly's comedy Dulcy (1921), and she remained a major stage star for the next four decades in an impressive succession of varied plays, including Theatre Guild stagings of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man (1925) and Pygmalion (1926), as well as The Goat Song (1926) and The Brothers Karamazov (1927). She appeared with Lunt in Ferenc Molnar's The Guardsman (1924), a triumph for the couple as a team, although again on her own Fontanne had a notable success as Nina Leeds in Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer PRizE-winning drama Strange Interlude (1928).

   During the 1920s, the Lunts won acclaim in S. N. Behrman's The Second Man (1927) and Meteor (1929), a revival of Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma (1927), Sil-Vara's Caprice (1928), and Maxwell Anderson's historical verse drama, Elizabeth the Queen* (1930). The Lunts achieved an impressive ability to work as a complementary unit, with Fontanne's beauty, poise, and subtlety balanced by Lunt's suave, impassioned acting. They were particularly applauded for their well-honed effect of seeming to interrupt each other's lines which, to critics of the time, created a higher level of realism than had previously been seen. The Lunts toured the United States intrepidly in most of their vehicles, considering it a duty to bring first-rate theatre to the provinces. The Lunts reached the peak of their joint achievement in the decade prior to World War II in a series of notable plays, including Robert E. Sherwood's Reunion in Vienna* (1931), Idiot's Delight* (1936), and There Shall Be No Night* (1940), Behrman's Amphitryon 38* (1937) and The Pirate* (1942), and Noël Coward's Design for Living (1933), in which the British playwright joined the Lunts onstage in a memorable threesome. Subsequent vehicles during the 1940s and 1950s proved less worthy of their unique talents, although their final appearance in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's drama The Visit (1958) once again provided an appropriate challenge met by the greatest acting couple in Broadway history.