Love Quote by Lynn Fontanne

There is something deliciously disarming about the way Lynn Fontanne makes longevity in marriage sound like a backstage trick. She frames devotion not as a moral achievement but as craft: two “realistic actors” repeatedly inhabiting lovers so convincingly that the performance loops back into private life. The punch is “divertissement” - a word that turns fidelity into play, marriage into a kind of elegant recreation. It’s witty without being brittle, frank without being confessional.

The intent feels twofold. On the surface, Fontanne is crediting her partnership’s durability to shared work: acting gave their relationship a renewable narrative engine. But the subtext is sharper: she’s implying that love, even in a successful marriage, can’t be allowed to calcify into mere domestic management. It needs an element of chosen illusion, a permission to flirt with the person you already vowed to. “I had an affair with him” lands as a subversive reframing of monogamy. It suggests the affair isn’t betrayal; it’s an ongoing act of re-selection, an erotic reintroduction.

Context matters: Fontanne and Alfred Lunt were famously private and professionally inseparable, icons of stage sophistication whose public image depended on controlled mystery. This quote punctures the sanctimony often attached to long marriages, especially among celebrated couples. She offers a modern-sounding thesis: commitment survives not by denying performance, but by harnessing it. Love lasts because they kept casting each other, night after night, as irresistible.