Richard Kind Ex Wife Dana Stanley: The Woman Behind the Quiet Life Richard Kind Never Talked About
She turned down a marriage proposal once — and that single “no” tells you almost everything you need to understand about Dana Stanley. She makes decisions on her own timeline, by her own standards, with no regard for what anyone else expects. That independence has defined her entire adult life, including the nineteen years she spent married to one of America’s most recognizable character actors.
Quick Bio
| Detail | Information |
| Full Name | Dana Stanley |
| Born | Exact date unknown; believed born circa early 1960s |
| Birthplace | Lighthouse Point, Florida, USA |
| Father | James C. Stanley |
| Education | Columbia University, New York City |
| Profession | Executive Director, Project ALS |
| Married | November 14, 1999 |
| Divorced | 2018 (separated publicly 2014) |
| Former Spouse | Richard Kind (actor, comedian) |
| Children | Skyler Kind (born c. 2002), twins Samantha and Max Kind (born c. 2005) |
| Residence | New York, USA (as of 2026) |
| Remarried | No confirmed remarriage |
A Woman from Florida Who Built Her Own Path
Dana Stanley grew up in Lighthouse Point, Florida — a small coastal city in Broward County that sits a world away from the Upper West Side of Manhattan where she would eventually raise three children. Her father, James C. Stanley, is the only family member on record. Her mother’s identity and the details of her upbringing have never been made public.
What is confirmed is where she went after Florida. She studied at one of the nation’s most rigorous universities, Columbia University in New York City. Getting into Columbia requires exceptional intellectual ability. Her time there shaped the trajectory of a career rooted in organizational leadership and nonprofit work.
She arrived in New York as a self-directed young woman from a quiet corner of Florida. She left Columbia equipped for something significantly more purposeful than celebrity life.
See also “Brita Ingegerd Olaisson: The Private Life Behind a Public Legacy“
The Career She Built Entirely on Her Own Terms
Dana Stanley’s professional identity has nothing to do with her marriage. That distinction matters because it is relatively rare among people who marry into Hollywood.
She became the Executive Director of Project ALS — a nonprofit organization based in New York that funds scientific research into Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS is a progressive neurological condition that destroys the nerve cells controlling movement. There is still no cure. The work Project ALS does sits at the serious, unglamorous end of charitable causes — no red carpets, no celebrity-driven galas engineered purely for visibility.
Dana’s role required fundraising skill, organizational leadership, and a genuine commitment to science-driven advocacy. The organization has, over the years, supported cutting-edge research at some of the world’s leading neuroscience institutions. She was not merely a figurehead attached to the role by association with her husband. She ran it.
During their marriage, she and Richard attended Project ALS benefit events together — including the 15th Annual Benefit in New York on October 19, 2012. In that context, their relationship existed partly in service to her work, not the other way around.
How She Met Richard Kind
The story of how Dana Stanley and Richard Kind came together is well-documented, primarily because Kind told it publicly with an obvious mixture of pride and self-deprecating humor.
They met and began dating sometime in the mid-1990s. Kind, already established as a television character actor through his role as Dr. Mark Devanow on Mad About You, had been with Dana for approximately two years when he decided the relationship needed to move forward.
His plan for the proposal was built entirely around the number eight — his self-declared lucky number. On August 8, 1997, he engineered an elaborate misdirection. He told Dana they were heading to a party on West 88th Street. The destination was a ruse. He brought her to the address 18 W. 88th Street, and at exactly eight minutes past eight in the evening, he got down on one knee.
He had a line prepared. It was: “Eight is my lucky number, and if you say yes, I’ll be the luckiest man in the world.”
She said no.
Kind later shared the story with evident amusement, acknowledging that his theatrical setup did not produce the expected result. Dana Stanley was not going to say yes simply because the moment had been choreographed. A month later, on her own schedule and by her own reasoning, she reconsidered and accepted.
The engagement lasted approximately two years. The wedding followed in November 1999.
A Wedding at Central Park, with a Famous Best Man
On November 14, 1999, Dana Stanley married Richard Kind at the Park View Restaurant inside the Central Park Boathouse in New York City. The setting was private and intimate, not a public spectacle designed for magazine coverage.
George Clooney served as Kind’s best man. The two men had been close friends for years — Clooney had actually lived in Kind’s Los Angeles apartment before landing his ER role, and their friendship had survived everything from professional lean years to full-blown Hollywood stardom. Clooney’s presence at the wedding said something about the depth of that friendship.
Dana’s side of the event remained entirely private, as it would throughout the marriage. No photographs of her at the wedding have circulated publicly. No interviews about the day were ever given. A famous best man stood at the altar — and Dana Stanley remained, in every meaningful way, just out of frame.
Nineteen Years: What Family Life Looked Like
The couple settled on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Kind has spoken publicly about the deliberate choice to raise children there — the neighborhood’s parks, subway access, and community feel made it, in his view, the right place for a family. They lived on West 82nd Street before purchasing a 2,500-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment in 2013 for $2.5 million.
Daughter Skyler was born around 2002. Twins Samantha and Max arrived in 2005. Dana managed the architecture of family life while Kind’s career continued to expand across television, film, and voice work.
The family briefly relocated to Los Angeles. It did not last. Kind said openly that he did not think LA suited young children. They returned to New York. The decision reflected the kind of practical, family-first thinking that appeared to characterize Dana’s approach to domestic life.
The couple appeared together at public events selectively — the premiere of A Serious Man at the Ziegfeld Theater in September 2009, the 32nd Kennedy Center Honors, and various Project ALS charity events across the early 2010s. These were not red-carpet exhibitions. They were purposeful, occasional appearances.
Publicly, they looked like a stable, functioning family. Behind that image, things were already beginning to shift.
The Separation That Surprised Everyone — and No One
In January 2014, Closer Weekly reported that Richard Kind and Dana Stanley were separating. The news broke while Kind was at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, promoting his independent film Obvious Child. When a reporter asked him about the split directly, his response was immediate and protective: “I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want my kids to know.”
At the time of the initial separation, Skyler was approximately eleven years old. The twins were around nine. Kind’s concern was not image management — it was his children’s awareness of a family rupture they were still processing.
The separation was described as amicable by sources close to the couple. No dramatic accusations appeared in the press. No legal confrontations became public. The marriage did not end in spectacle.
Here is where the timeline becomes slightly complicated. Some sources indicate the couple officially divorced in 2014, when the separation first became public. Wikipedia records their marriage as lasting from 1999 to 2018. The distinction appears to rest on the difference between public separation and finalized legal divorce — a gap that many couples navigate privately over years.
What is clear is this: the marriage was effectively over by early 2014, and legally concluded by 2018. The reasons remain undisclosed.
One tabloid source — the website Hitberry, which has a documented history of unverified celebrity reporting — claimed without attribution that an affair on Dana’s part caused the divorce. This assertion has not been verified by any reliable source. It should be treated with significant skepticism and is noted here only to acknowledge it exists, not to endorse it.
What Richard Kind Has Said — and What He Hasn’t
Kind’s public statements about Dana Stanley across the years reveal a man navigating real complexity with genuine restraint.
At Sundance in January 2014, he declined to discuss the separation out of concern for his children. That response was not evasion — it was clear-eyed parenting from a public figure who understood exactly what a tabloid quote could do to a nine-year-old’s morning.
In prior interviews, he described Dana as a key part of his early life — the stability behind years of professional momentum. He has not spoken disparagingly about her at any point in any interview that has entered the public record. That, too, tells you something.
She has said nothing publicly. Not a single interview. Not a statement. Not a social media post.
Between the two of them, they managed to end a nineteen-year marriage with three children involved and produce almost no collateral damage for public consumption. That requires discipline from both sides.
Life After the Marriage
After the divorce, Dana Stanley retreated even further from public visibility. She holds no active social media accounts that have been publicly identified. She has not attended events in any capacity connected to Richard Kind’s career. There is no record of a subsequent relationship or remarriage as of 2026.
She continued her work with Project ALS. The organization has remained active in ALS research funding, and Dana’s leadership role represents the through-line of a career entirely distinct from her former marriage.
Her children remain in New York. Richard Kind continues to live on the Upper West Side, and by his own account maintains an active relationship with all three of them. He shared photos of daughter Samantha on Instagram during a summer she spent working at Cloverbrooke Farm in Hyde Park, New York — a moment of ordinary, cheerful family life that suggested a functional co-parenting arrangement.
Dana Stanley’s current life appears to be exactly the kind she has always chosen. Private. Purposeful. On her own terms.
What She Represents — Beyond the Famous Ex-Husband
Dana Stanley’s story matters precisely because she has refused to let it be someone else’s story about her.
She married a man with a George Clooney-level social circle, attended charitable events, raised three children in Manhattan, and then, when the marriage ended, simply declined to participate in the narrative that often follows. No memoir. No interviews. No social media confessions. No pivot into celebrity-adjacent visibility.
Her career at Project ALS represents work that outlasts the marriage, the tabloid interest, and the curiosity of strangers. ALS research is slow and underfunded relative to the scale of devastation the disease causes. The people who fund that research don’t get profiles in entertainment magazines.
Dana Stanley chose that work when she was married to a recognizable actor and had every opportunity to pursue easier, more glamorous nonprofit work. She kept choosing it after the divorce.
That is not a small detail. It is, in fact, the most revealing one.
FAQs
1. Who is Dana Stanley?
Dana Stanley is the former wife of American actor and comedian Richard Kind. She is a Columbia University graduate and the Executive Director of Project ALS, a nonprofit funding research into Lou Gehrig’s disease. She is best known publicly for her marriage to Kind, though she has built an independent career separate from that connection.
2. When did Dana Stanley and Richard Kind get married?
They married on November 14, 1999, at the Park View Restaurant inside the Central Park Boathouse in New York City.
3. Who was the best man at their wedding?
George Clooney served as Richard Kind’s best man. Clooney and Kind share a long friendship that predates Kind’s marriage, rooted in their years as struggling actors in Los Angeles.
4. Did Dana Stanley say no to Richard Kind’s proposal?
Yes. On August 8, 1997, Kind proposed at 18 W. 88th Street at 8:08 PM — a setup built around his lucky number eight. She said no. One month later, she reconsidered and accepted. They became engaged and married two years after that.
5. How many children do Dana Stanley and Richard Kind have?
Three. Skyler Kind, their oldest daughter, was born around 2002. Twins Samantha and Max Kind were born in 2005.
6. What does Dana Stanley do professionally?
She serves as the Executive Director of Project ALS, a New York-based nonprofit organization that raises funding for scientific research toward a cure for ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease).
7. When did Dana Stanley and Richard Kind separate?
The separation became public in January 2014, when Closer Weekly reported on it during the Sundance Film Festival. The legal divorce was finalized by 2018, per Wikipedia’s record of the marriage.
8. Why did they divorce?
The reasons have never been publicly confirmed by either party. The split was described as amicable at the time of the initial separation. No verified statement about the cause has ever been made by Dana or Richard.
9. Did Dana Stanley remarry after the divorce?
As of 2026, there is no confirmed record of Dana Stanley remarrying or entering a publicly known relationship after the divorce.
10. Does Dana Stanley have social media?
No. She maintains no known active social media presence. This is consistent with her overall approach to privacy throughout and after her marriage.
11. Where did Dana Stanley grow up?
She is believed to have grown up in Lighthouse Point, Florida.James C. Stanley is the name of her father.No other verified details about her early life or family background are on public record.
12. Where does Dana Stanley live now?
As of 2026, she is believed to live in New York, most likely on or near the Upper West Side of Manhattan where the family resided during the marriage. No confirmed current address has been publicly reported.
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