The Four Poster

Jan de Hartog’s two-person stage play The Fourposter has always seemed to attract married acting couples, a tradition established by the play’s first Broadway stars Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. The film version featured Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, who (you guessed it) were man and wife at the time. The story traces the history of a marriage from the wedding night in 1890 to the death of the wife in the 1930s; all crucial scenes are acted out in the couple’s boudoir, near the fourposter bed they’d received as a wedding present. The passing years, and the triumphs and tragedies of the couple, are wittily represented by transitional animation sequences produced by the UPA cartoon studios. A musical version of The Fourposter titled I Do I Do opened on Broadway in 1966, breaking precedent by starring Mary Martin and Robert Preston, who were happily married but not to each other.