Lynn Fontanne (; 6 December 1887 – 30 July 1983) was an English actress. After early success in supporting roles in the West End and United States, she married the American actor Alfred Lunt in 1922, with whom she co-starred in Broadway and West End productions over the next four decades. They became known as "The Lunts", and were celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic.
Fontanne was born in what is now the London suburb of Woodford, and received her first training as an actress from Ellen Terry. After building up an acting career in Britain she worked extensively in the US, first appearing in New York in 1910. Although she appeared in classics including The Taming of the Shrew and The Seagull, experimental drama by Eugene O'Neill, and dark comedy by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Fontanne and her husband were best known for their stylish performances in light comedies by Noël Coward, S. N. Behrman, Terence Rattigan and others, and romantic plays by writers such as Robert E. Sherwood.
The Lunts retired from the stage in 1960, and lived at their home in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, where, after outliving her husband by six years, Fontanne died at the age of 95.
Fontanne was born Lillie Louise Fontanne in Woodford, Essex (now London), on 6 December 1887. She was the youngest of the three daughters of Jules Pierre Antoine Fontanne (1855–1942) and his wife Frances Ellen, née Thornley (1858–1921). She was educated in London, after which a family friend introduced her to the leading actress Ellen Terry, who sometimes gave lessons to promising young players. Partly as a result of Terry’s training and influence, Fontanne was given roles in plays in London and on tour throughout England from 1905 to 1916. She made her first appearance at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, at Christmas 1905, in the chorus of the pantomime, Cinderella, and subsequently "walked on" (i.e. was a non-speaking extra) in productions in London starring Lewis Waller, Sir Herbert Tree, Lena Ashwell and others.
During 1909, she toured as Rose in Lady Frederick with Mabel Love. At the Garrick Theatre, London, in December 1909 she appeared in Where Children Rule, and in Billy's Bargain at the same theatre in June 1910 she played Lady Mulberry. She then made her first visit to America, making her début in New York at Nazimova's 39th Street Theatre in November 1910 as Harriet Budgeon in Mr Preedy and the Countess with Weedon Grossmith.
After returning to London in 1911 she played at the Criterion Theatre in The Young Lady of Seventeen and at the Vaudeville in A Storm in a Tea Shop. She then toured in the provinces in 1912–13 as Gertrude Rhead in Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblock's Milestones, before playing the part in London. In that role she had to play the same character in youth, middle age and old age. The American star Laurette Taylor saw her in the role and was impressed. At the Royalty Theatre in April 1914 Fontanne scored a success as Liza and Mrs Collison in Knoblock's My Lady's Dress. She played in four other London productions in 1914–15, including the premiere of The Starlight Express. She became engaged to marry a young lawyer, Teddy Byrne, but he was killed in action in 1916 during the First World War.
Shortly before Byrne's death, Fontanne accepted an offer to join Laurette Taylor's company in New York. Taylor and her husband, Hartley Manners, fostered the young Fontanne's career. Taylor later said, "While acting with her I forgot we were actresses". After five plays with them, Fontanne graduated to leading roles for other managements. Between 1918 and 1920, she succeeded Laura Hope Crews as Mrs Rockingham in "A Pair of Petticoats" in New York, and was the female lead in new plays on Broadway and in Chicago and Philadelphia. During this time, playing in summer stock in Washington DC, she met the actor Alfred Lunt. They fell in love, although at first Lunt's wooing was more hesitant than Fontanne would have wished.
In mid-1920 Fontanne appeared once again in the West End, appearing with Taylor in a play by Manners, One Night in Rome. She had little chance to shine in what The Stage called "a one-part play" written as a vehicle for Taylor. Wanting to be reunited with Lunt, Fontanne quickly returned to the US, where in 1921 she had her first big success, in the lead role of George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly's comedy Dulcy. She did not return to the West End for nine years.
In May 1922 Fontanne married Lunt, and in 1923 they made their first appearance together in a Broadway production, a revival of Paul Kester's 1900 costume drama Sweet Nell of Old Drury. Although Taylor was the female lead, it was Fontanne who impressed the critics. In The New York Herald, Alexander Woollcott dismissed the play as "gaudy rubbish", but added:
In 1924, the Lunts joined the company of the Theatre Guild, which, in the words of Fontanne's biographer Jared Brown, "staged plays on Broadway but defied Broadway conventions by offering serious and innovative plays that were regularly rejected by commercial managements". The first play in which the couple appeared for the Guild was Ferenc Molnár's The Guardsman, in which they established a reputation for playing light comedy. They acted together in three plays by Bernard Shaw: Arms and the Man (as Raina and Bluntschli, 1925), Pygmalion (as Eliza and Higgins, 1926) and The Doctor's Dilemma (as the Dubedats, 1927). Fontanne had the chance to demonstrate her versatility by switching from comedy to demanding experimental drama in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928), described by Woollcott as "the Abie's Irish Rose of the pseudo-intelligentsia".
Fontanne and Lunt introduced a naturalistic new way of delivering dialogue, building on a technique Fontanne had begun to explore in her performances with Laurette Taylor. It was unheard of for an actor to speak while another was still speaking, but, in Brown's words:
As a consequence, according to Brown, the Lunts' scenes together could be "more vivid, more real than those of other actors".
In 1928, Fontanne and Lunt co-starred in what for the Guild was an untypically frothy comedy, Caprice. The biographer Margot Peters calls the production a milestone in their careers for two reasons: it was the first production in which they, rather than the play, were the main draw, and it marked the start of their inseparable theatrical partnership: from then on they always appeared together. They took Caprice to London in 1930 – Lunt's first appearance there – and won the admiration of audiences, critics, and writers including Shaw and J. B. Priestley. For the Guild in New York, Fontanne and Lunt starred in Robert Sherwood's romantic comedy Reunion in Vienna which opened in November 1931 and ran throughout the season, before a nationwide tour. The two were strong believers in touring, taking many of their Broadway hits to remote locations as well as the larger American cities. They felt a double responsibility to do so: to ensure that playwrights had their works presented to as many people as possible, and to allow people outside New York to see Broadway productions.
Fontanne and Lunt had been close friends of the English actor and playwright Noël Coward since they met in New York in 1921, before any of them had achieved success in the theatre. They had resolved then that when they were famous, Coward would write a play for all three of them to star in. The Lunts' marriage was the subject of much conjecture in theatrical circles: although they were clearly devoted to each other, there were unsubstantiated but persistent rumours that Lunt was bisexual and had gay liaisons; there was also speculation that Fontanne had extramarital interests. Against this background, Coward wrote a comedy for the three of them, Design for Living (1932), in which Fontanne's character switches back and forth between the two men, who then pair up when she deserts them both, before all three end up together. The combination of the risqué subject and the popularity of the three stars caused box-office records to be broken, and reportedly earned Fontanne and her co-stars the highest salaries paid on Broadway to that time.