Frederick Lonsdale (5 February 1881 – 4 April 1954) was a British playwright known for his librettos to several successful musicals early in the 20th century, including King of Cadonia (1908), The Balkan Princess (1910), Betty (1915), The Maid of the Mountains (1917), Monsieur Beaucaire (1919) and Madame Pompadour (1923). He also wrote comedy plays, including Aren't We All? (1923), The Last of Mrs Cheyney (1925) and On Approval (1927) and the murder melodrama But for the Grace of God (1946). Some of his plays and musicals were made into films, and he also wrote a few screenplays.
Born and raised in Jersey, Lonsdale began writing comic sketches while serving in the army. His first play, Who's Hamilton?, was produced in 1903. In 1904 he eloped with Leslie Brooke Hoggan, through whom he was introduced to Frank Curzon. Curzon began to produce Lonsdale's musicals and comic plays in 1908 in the West End with The King of Cadonia. The Maid of the Mountains, opening in 1917, ran for 1,352 performances, becoming the second-longest-running musical in West End history. Through the 1920s, many of Lonsdale's musicals and plays enjoyed success. After this, his familiar genres, Edwardian musical comedy and drawing-room comedy, lost popularity. He continued to write plays and some screenplays for another two decades, moving to the United States in 1938.
Life and career
Early years
Lonsdale was born Lionel Frederick Leonard in St Helier, Jersey, the third and youngest son of Susan ( Belford) and John Henry Leonard, a tobacconist. He was educated on Jersey, left school at seventeen and joined the South Lancashire Regiment as a private. He had been a troublesome and wayward child and youth, and one biographer – his daughter Frances Donaldson – surmises that his parents may have felt that army discipline might be beneficial. He did not adapt well to army life, and persuaded a sympathetic doctor to provide him with a medical discharge on the grounds of a heart condition (of which no more was heard for the rest of his life). Her father, disapproving, took her back to Canada but Lonsdale pursued her, working his way across the Atlantic as a steward on a liner. Once in Canada, his attempt to be reunited with the young woman was thwarted by the shotgun-wielding father and he returned to England, where he worked for a time performing odd jobs on the Southampton docks. It was billed as being by "Keith Lonsdale" although the press mentioned that the author's real name was L. F. Leonard. A touring company brought the piece to Jersey, where it was announced that owing to the illness of the leading man, the author would play the part. According to his biographer Katherine Mullin it played "to a packed and appreciative house", and it was the only play in which Lonsdale ever acted. it was not produced and Edouin died not long afterwards. Lonsdale later rewrote the play as the highly successful On Approval. To earn some more money his wife joined William Greet's company as a chorus-girl. When she told Greet that her husband was a playwright he asked to see examples of his work. Having read them, Greet told Lonsdale that although the plays were not of the type he produced, they might be of interest to Frank Curzon, to whom he had sent them.
Lonsdale and his wife had three daughters, Maria, Frances and Mab, the second of whom became his biographer shortly after his death. According to an article in The Genealogist in 2011, Lonsdale also had an illegitimate daughter called Angela Worthington, who married Robin Fox and was the mother of the actors Edward and James Fox and the producer Robert Fox.
First West End successes
Curzon put Lonsdale under contract and paid him a modest allowance until the first of his plays were presented nearly three years later. On 3 September 1908 Curzon produced The King of Cadonia at the Prince of Wales Theatre; this was a musical comedy with a book by Lonsdale, lyrics by Adrian Ross and Arthur Wimperis and music by Sidney Jones and Frederick Rosse. It ran for 333 performances at a time when any run of more than 250 performances was considered notable. The following week Curzon presented The Early Worm at Wyndham's Theatre; it was a non-musical farce, starring Weedon Grossmith and Fanny Brough and ran until late November. In 1909 and 1910 Curzon staged another play by Lonsdale and another musical comedy with a book by him, co-written by Curzon: The Best People at Wyndham's and The Balkan Princess at the Prince of Wales. According to Lonsdale's obituarist in The Times the former, although it had only a moderate run of sixty performances, was "a comedy that served as model for almost everything he attempted later ... an adroit and witty trifle, bearing no close resemblance to life as it is lived, about the philanderings of the idle rich".
After The Balkan Princess, except for a revue sketch for Charles Hawtrey, Lonsdale's next five works for the theatre were all musical comedies. He wrote or co-wrote the books of Betty (1915), High Jinks (1916), The Maid of the Mountains (1917), Monsieur Beaucaire (1919) and The Lady of the Rose (1922). His collaborators included the lyricists Adrian Ross, Otto Harbach and Harry Graham and the composers André Messager, Rudolph Friml, Jean Gilbert and Harold Fraser-Simson. All had excellent runs and The Maid of the Mountains, with 1,352 performances, became the second-longest running musical play in a West End theatre to that date.
Drawing-room comedies
After these musical successes Lonsdale returned to spoken comedy with Aren't We All?. Although it was far from his greatest success at the box-office – running for only 58 performances The first of these was produced at the St James's Theatre, with the leading roles played by Gladys Cooper, Ellis Jeffreys, Ronald Squire, and Gerald Du Maurier and ran for 514 performances in London, and did well also in New York, Berlin and Paris. On a visit to London he died in the street as he was walking back from dinner at Claridges with Sir John Marriott, with whom he had been staying.
Critical response
In its obituary of Lonsdale The Times called him "a most entertaining, deft, and successful playwright, an unerring craftsman in his own vein of artificial light comedy". The writer continued: