Frederick Leonard Lonsdale

British playwright

Also known as: Lionel Frederick Leonard

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Frederick Leonard Lonsdale (born Feb. 5, 1881, St. Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands, U.K.—died April 4, 1954, London, Eng.) was a British playwright and librettist whose lightweight comedies of manners were admired because of their tight construction and epigrammatic wit. Lonsdale established himself as a librettist of musical comedies, chief among them being The King of Cadonia (1908), The Balkan Princess (1910), and The Maid of the Mountains (1916). During the 1920s, however, he began to...