From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Portrait of Lynn Fontanne by Carl Van Vechten, May 23, 1932

Lynn Fontanne (December 6, 1887 – July 30, 1983) was an Emmy Award winning actress who was a major stage star for over 40 years and who with her husband Alfred Lunt was part of the most acclaimed acting team in the history of the American theater.

She refused to relinquish her British citizenship, despite having lived in the U.S. for over 60 years, and was a Kennedy Center honoree very late in life.

Born Lillie Louise Fontanne in Woodford, United Kingdom. First becoming popular in the title role of George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly's farce, Dulcy, in 1920 she soon became celebrated for her skill as an actress in high comedy, excelling in witty roles written for her by Noel Coward, S. N. Behrman and Robert Sherwood. By contrast, she enjoyed one of the greatest critical successes of her career as Nina Leeds, the desperate heroine of Eugene O'Neill's nine-act drama, Strange Interlude.

From the late 1920s on, Fontanne acted exclusively in vehicles also starring her husband. Among their greatest theater triumphs were Design for Living (1933), The Taming of the Shrew (1935-1936), Idiot's Delight (1936), and There Shall Be No Night (1940). The Lunts remained highly active on the stage until retiring in 1960.

Fontanne only made three movies, but nevertheless, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1931 for The Guardsman, losing to the much younger Helen Hayes.

The Lunts starred in four television productions in the 1950s and 1960s with Fontanne winning an Emmy award in 1963 for The Old Lady Shows Her Medals. Additionally, she narrated the classic 1960 television production of Peter Pan starring Mary Martin.

The Lunts also starred in several radio dramas in the 1940s, notably on the Theatre Guild program. Many of these broadcasts still survive.

Fontanne's romance with Lunt began in 1920 while he was starring in the play Clarence with Helen Hayes, who had discreetly fallen in love with him. The Lunts were married in 1922. Hayes' remained a lifelong friend of the pair, although many believe she never quite forgave Fontanne for "stealing" Lunt from her, Hayes' 1988 autobiography, published after the Lunts' deaths contains several barbs directed at Fontanne, who supposedly was her friend for decades.

The Lunts lived for many years in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, but never had children. By all accounts, Lynn Fontanne was among the most duplicitous of actresses regarding her true age. Her husband died believing she was 5 years younger than him (as she had told him), and refused to believe anything to the contrary, although several magazine profiles on the stars reported her true age. She was, in fact, 5 years older, but continued to deny long after Lunt's death that she was born in 1887 (the year now attributed to her birth); she even misreported her year of birth accordingly to the U.S. Social Security Administration.

Asked how to say her name, she told The Literary Digest she preferred the French way, but "If the French is too difficult for American consumption, both syllables should be equally accented, and the a should be more or less broad": fon-tahn. (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)

Lynn Lunt, as she is known in the Social Security Death Index ([1]) is interred next to her equally famous husband, Alfred Lunt, at the Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

She was survived by a niece.