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.

Biography

Alfred Davis Lunt, Jr. was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1892 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.

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.



He and his wife, Lynn Fontanne, whom he married on May 26, 1922, in New York City, were the pre-eminent Broadway acting couple of American history. 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. (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 twenty plays. They also were featured, posthumously, on an American postage stamp.

The couple made two films together The Guardsman (1931), in which they starred, and Hollywood Canteen (1944) 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 subsequent retirement years were spent at their home "Ten Chimneys" at Genesee Depot in Lunt's home state of Wisconsin.

In 1964, Lunt and Fontanne were presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.

Like Lynn Fontanne, Alfred Lunt is represented in the American Theatre Hall of Fame.

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