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Alfred Lunt: Stage
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Respected stage star Alfred Lunt occasionally appeared in motion pictures; this curious and not terribly inspired mystery from Goldwyn was his inauspicious film debut. When Yvonne de Chausson (Edith Roberts) comes home from a trip to France, she is told that her grandfather, lumber magnate Andre de Mersay (Emile La Croix), has been stricken with an undisclosed illness. He is sequestered in a room and his secretary refuses to allow Yvonne to see him. Her attempts to get to him are constantly thwarted and the plot thickens with the appearance of John Thorne (Lunt), who purchases part of the family's land holdings without Yvonne's consent. A flashback to the France of the days of Louis XV early on in the film gives a few clues to the finish. Yvonne eventually discovers that her grandfather is dead, and a fight between Thorne and the old man's doctor (Frank Evans) proves that Thorne is really on Yvonne's side.
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Married in 1922, Lunt and Fontanne were inseparable at home and on the stage. In 1960, they retired from the stage and took up full-time residence at Ten Chimneys. He died in Chicago at age 84 in 1977, and she died at Ten Chimneys in 1983 at 96.
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"It took the supreme talents of Lunt and Fontanne to make this delicate stage material work. Although the public did not respond well to the sophisticated comedy, the film was a smashing critical success. Except for cameo roles in STAGE DOOR CANTEEN, this would be the only sound film the couple made in their illustrious careers, although Hollywood had previously wooed them into silents. MGM's Irving Thalberg managed to convince the famous pair to leave Broadway for THE GUARDSMAN, but it took a lot of convincing. To them the movies were merely cloudy mirrors of their own live theater reputations, reflections they did not appreciate. But in all fairness to their undeniable talent, it is said both realized they didn't photograph worth a damn."
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THE VISIT, the initial production which opened the newly renamed Lunt-Fontanne Theater, had a large set which used the entire stage. Actors wishing to go from wing to the other without being seen by the audience had to go outside one stage door and around the stage end of the theater reentering at the other stage door.
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Passionate about the theater, Lunt and FontanIne carefully dressed each room of their home as if it were a stage. Much of the contents of the estate are still intact and unchanged, from historic furnishings to hand-painted murals and diverse collections.
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In this new biography, Margot Peters catches the magic of Lunt and Fontanne—their period, their work, their intimacy and its contradictions—with candor, delicacy, intelligence, and wit. She writes about their personal and creative choices as deftly as she captures their world, from their meeting (backstage, naturally)—when Fontanne was a young actress in the first flush of stardom and Lunt a lanky midwesterner who came in the stage door, bowed to her elaborately, lost his balance, and fell down the stairs—and the early days when an unknown and very hungry Noël Coward lived in a swank hotel in a room the size of a closet and cadged meals at their table to the telegram the famous couple once sent to a movie mogul, turning down a studio contract worth a fortune (“We can be bought, my dear Mr. Laemmle, but we can’t be bored”).
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