His widow, an eccentric and willful woman, gradually lost all the money, and the family moved to Waukesha, where they ran a boarding house.

His biographer Jared Brown writes that Lunt "rarely attended classes, having found a job as a minor actor and assistant stage manager with the Castle Square Theatre in Boston".

[1] He made his first professional stage appearance there on October 7, 1912, as the Sheriff in The Aviator, and remained as a member of the stock company for two years.

[3] In 1914, Lunt toured with Margaret Anglin in Beverley's Balance, remaining with her company for eighteen months, appearing in Green Stockings, As You Like It, Iphigenia in Tauris and Medea.

He then appeared in a summer stock season in Washington, D.C., where he met Lynn Fontanne, a rising young English actress.

[7] In May 1922, he married Fontanne, 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.

[1] They acted together in three plays by Shaw: Arms and the Man (as Bluntschli and Raina, 1925), Pygmalion (as Higgins and Eliza, 1926) and The Doctor's Dilemma (as the Dubedats, 1927).

[12] For the Guild in New York, Lunt and Fontanne starred in Robert Sherwood's romantic comedy Reunion in Vienna, which opened in November 1931 and ran throughout the season, before a nationwide tour.

[14] 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.

Coward recorded that while he was refining his original ideas for the play, "Alfred had suggested a few stage directions which, if followed faithfully, would undoubtedly have landed all three of us in gaol".

[16] The immense success of Design for Living led Coward to write another play for his friends, but his Point Valaine, in which Lunt and Fontanne starred in 1934, was a failure.

For Coward, the piece was an uncharacteristically serious drama, and the grim plot and unsympathetic characters did not appeal to audiences used to seeing the Lunts in glamorous and romantic roles; Fontanne's prediction that the play would run for just a few weeks proved correct.

[21] The Lunts gave up their usual summer break there during the latter part of the Second World War, because at Fontanne's behest the couple moved to England.

She felt she should share the hardships of her family and friends there, and from 1943 to 1945 the Lunts appeared in the West End, and in performances for the troops, including a tour of army camps in France and Germany in 1945.

Among his productions was Così fan Tutte, sung in English, at the Metropolitan Opera in December 1951, critically praised and much revived subsequently.

In the first performances of the production, Lunt made a rare stage appearance without Fontanne, in the silent role of a footman, opening the opera by lighting candles and exiting before the action began.

On the day after the news was released, every Broadway theatre dimmed its lights for one minute at 7.59 p.m., except for the Lunt-Fontanne, which remained brilliantly lit.

[30] In September 1964, Lunt and Fontanne were presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson at a White House ceremony.