Pamela Stanley

Pamela Margaret Stanley (6 September 1909 – 30 June 1991) was a British actress who worked across stage and film in both Britain and the United States. Born in Nether Alderley, Cheshire, she was the daughter of Sir Arthur Lyulph Stanley, the fifth Baron Stanley of Alderley, and Margaret Evans-Gordon, whose father was the MP Henry Evans-Gordon. Stanley spent her early childhood in Australia, where her father served as Governor of Victoria from 1914 to 1919. She received her education in France and Switzerland before training at the Webber Douglas School of Acting and Singing. Her mother was a noted amateur actress and a descendant of the Kemble family of actors.

Stanley made her professional stage debut in Derby Day at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith in 1932, after which she spent six months with the Oxford Repertory Company, where her roles included Mrs. Marwood in The Way of the World. In 1933 she appeared alongside Martin Harvey in Leopold David Lewis's The Bells at the Savoy Theatre, and the following year she played Wendy in Peter Pan. Also in 1934, she took part in two productions directed by Sir Robert Atkins at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre: she played Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a cast that included Phyllis Neilson-Terry, Leslie French, and Greer Garson in an uncredited role, and she appeared as Miranda opposite John Drinkwater's Prospero in The Tempest, with French as Ariel and Atkins as Caliban.

The role most closely associated with Stanley throughout her career was that of Queen Victoria. She first took on the part in Laurence Housman's Victoria Regina at the Gate Theatre in 1935, a performance that drew comparisons from the critic James Agate to a New York production starring Helen Hayes. While Agate found Hayes' portrayal overwhelming by comparison, he noted that Stanley had moments of genuine emotion that moved her audience, and that the opening-night crowd responded with evident appreciation. Contemporary photographs confirmed a striking physical resemblance between Stanley and the queen. She returned to Victoria Regina for another season at the Lyric in 1937–1938, and appeared as Queen Victoria again in the 1936 film David Livingstone and the 1938 film Marigold. Decades later, in 1968, she made a final stage appearance in the role in William Douglas-Home's The Queen's Highland Servant at the Savoy Theatre in London, a play the author described in his memoirs as his favourite.

In 1936, Stanley appeared on Broadway in Hamlet, playing Ophelia opposite Leslie Howard. The production ran for 39 performances, arriving in the wake of a highly successful Broadway run of the same play by John Gielgud, and the critical reception was unfavorable. Her final screen appearance was an uncredited part as the Governor's Wife in The Last Hand Grenade, directed by Gordon Flemyng and starring Stanley Baker, Honor Blackman, and Richard Attenborough.

In 1941, Stanley married David Cunynghame, Sir Henry David St Leger Brooke Selwyn Cunynghame, the 11th Baronet Cunynghame, becoming Lady Cunynghame. During the war the couple lived at Overleigh House in Buckminster, Leicestershire. They had three sons, Andrew, John, and Arthur; Andrew succeeded his father as the 12th Baronet in 1978 upon David Cunynghame's death. Her husband worked as a film production manager on a number of notable productions, including Things to Come with Ralph Richardson, three films starring Robert Donat — The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Ghost Goes West, and Knight Without Armour with Marlene Dietrich — and two films by Michael Powell, The Lion Has Wings and The Thief of Bagdad. Stanley survived her husband and died on 30 June 1991 at the age of eighty-one.