Alfred Lunt - Personal Life

Personal Life

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

Along with his wife Lynn Fontanne, whom he married on May 26, 1922, in New York City, he was half of the pre-eminent Broadway acting couple of American history, having the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway named in their honor. Celebrated for their sophisticated comic skills, they were known for their ability to swiftly overlap dialogue with such adroitness that every word was understood.

Secure in their public image as a happily married couple, they sometimes titillated audiences by playing adulterers, as in Robert Sherwood's Reunion in Vienna, or as part of a menage a trois in Noël Coward's Design for Living. (In fact, Design for Living, 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 that it would not survive the censor in London.) The Lunts appeared together in over 24 plays - and most recently on an American postage stamp. The couple also made one film together (The Guardsman; 1931), starred in several radio dramas for the Theatre Guild in the 1940s and starred in a few television productions in the 1950s and 1960s. They retired in 1966.

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