Word: lunts
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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What first-nighters found they had paid for was a comedy written with a stylish stylus, a mort of Jovian musing, some heavy-handed Olympian plotting-and the Lunts. Just as all but the extremely myopic soon discovered that the display of buttockry in the startling opening set was a plaster hoax, so none but the most zealous Lunt-Fontanne champions found Amphitryon 38 the perfect play...
...until two years later that they met, on a staircase backstage in Manhattan's Hudson Theatre, where they were both rehearsing for Maid of Money. That was the first of the 21 plays in which they have since appeared together. At their meeting courtly Alfred Lunt bent to kiss Miss Fontanne's hand, flopped down the staircase. The play tried out in Washington, flopped too. The romance was more durable. They remained in Washington with George C. Tyler's company, played there in A Young Man's Fancy, and parted, Miss Fontanne to Chicago with...
Their first play on Broadway together was Sweet Nell of Old Drury, a salaryless Actors Equity benefit. Actor Lunt recalls it as his wife's first part as a beauty, in the role of Lady Castlemaine, remembers that they spent all their ready cash on fake jewelry to make her look more fetching. The acclaim for the new stage beauty was led by Mr. Lunt's deaf mother, Mrs. Harriet Sederholm, whose untempered voice could be heard quite plainly from the audience asking her neighbor, "Isn't she a dream...
Broadway perennially bemoans the collapse of the road. For the Lunts the road has never failed. Since The Guardsman they have, in Alfred Lunt's phrase, gone buckety-buckety over the U. S., always sure of a hearty welcome from coast to coast. The Lunts put this success down to a variety of good plays. The nation puts it down to the bickering, wrestling, fighting, cooing, unfailingly endearing intimacy of Lunt-Fontanne on-stage relations, their expert charm. The Guild paired them in Arms and the Man, The Goat Song, At Mrs. Beam's, Pygmalion, Juarez and Maximilian...
Whether or not the Lunts would be good for Hollywood, Hollywood would probably not be very enjoyable for Alfred Lunt. He and his wife are theatre people through & through. Alfred Lunt has worked 30 to 40 weeks a year for 23 years in the theatre, but fears first nights as the devil fears holy water, worries over the size of the audience, suffers tearful agonies if there is a hint that his performance has not been up to his best. One of the consequent duties of faithful, bustling Lawrence Farrell, once his dresser, now his play manager, is to beguile...