Word: lunts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even those who did not know the legend of Amphitryon*-whose wife Alcmena was seduced by Jupiter-expected this because they knew Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Spirited Aphrodisiantics, urbanely conducted infidelities are the hallmark of Lunt-Fontanne plays, which take on added zest from the well-known fact that Actors Lunt and Fontanne have been contentedly married for the last 15 years...
...Play. Amphitryon 38, adapted for the Lunts by Samuel Nathaniel Behrman from the French farce of Jean Hippolyte Giraudoux, is approximately the 38th dramatic version of the Theban legend of how all-powerful Zeus (Roman Jupiter) had to assume the mental as well as the physical aspects of Amphitryon before Alcmena would bed him. The Lunts studied the play, which they were quick to see contained one of their favorite situations, for several months before trying it out last June in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Later they took it to Baltimore, Washington and Cleveland, to whose critics the play...
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...