Frederick Lonsdale

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Frederick Lonsdale (born February 5, 1881 in Saint Helier , Jersey , † April 4, 1954 in London ; actually Lionel Frederick Leonard ) was a British librettist and playwright .

Life

Frederick Lonsdale was born Lionel Frederick Leonard in 1881 in a small cottage in Saint Helier , the capital of the Channel Island of Jersey . His father was a tobacco dealer, his mother a housewife. Lonsdale was initially an employee of the London and South Western Railway before he could start his writing career with the help of his wife Leslie Brooke Hoggan. As a revue dancer, Hoggan had drawn the attention of her employer to a work by her husband. This was given to the theater producer Frank Curzon, who finally brought Lonsdale's libretto King of Cadonia to the stage as a musical in London in 1908 . The libretto was inspired by Anthony Hope's novel The Prisoner of Zenda ( The Prisoner of Zenda , 1894), the music was written by Sidney Jones . In 1910, the musical was also performed on Broadway in New York . Lonsdale then provided further templates for musicals, of which The Maid of the Mountains (1917) was by far the most successful. He also adapted operettas such as Jean Gilbert's Die Frau im Ermelin and Katja, the Dancer or Leo Falls Madame Pompadour for the British audience.

From 1923 he also wrote plays, preferably ironic comedies about good manners and about the then modern ideas of marriage. The comedy The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1925) about a maid who gives up his criminal career within a gang of thieving domestic servants in order to marry an aristocrat ran for almost a year on Broadway and was made into several films, including 1929 with Norma Shearer , 1937 with Joan Crawford and 1951 with Greer Garson .

Lonsdale, who died of a heart attack in London in 1954 , was the father of Frances Donaldson, who published a biography about him with Freddy Lonsdale in 1957, and Angela Fox, who emerged from an extramarital relationship and who was the mother of actors Edward and James Fox should be.

Works

Libretti

  • King of Cadonia , 1908
  • The Balkan Princess , 1910
  • Betty , 1915
  • The Maid of the Mountains , 1917
  • Monsieur Beaucaire , 1919
  • The Street Singer , 1924
  • Lady Mary , 1928

Dramas

  • Aren't we all? , 1923 (German: is n't that all of us? )
  • Spring Cleaning , 1923
  • The Fake , 1924
  • The Last of Mrs. Cheyney , 1925 (English: Mrs. Cheney's end )
  • On Approval , 1926 (German: marriage on probation )
  • The High Road , 1927
  • Canaries Sometimes Sing , 1929
  • Once Is Enough , 1938 (dt .: Once is enough )
  • Another Love Story , 1943
  • The Way Things Go , 1950

Filmography

Literary template

literature

  • Frances Donaldson: Freddy Lonsdale . William Heinemann Ltd., London 1957.
  • Martin Banham (Ed.): The Cambridge Guide to Theater . Cambridge University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-521-43437-8 , p. 650.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lonsdale, Frederick
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leonard, Lionel Frederick (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British librettist and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint Helier on Jersey , United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH April 4th 1954
Place of death London