Richard Kind Ex Wife Dana Stanley: The Woman Who Said No, Then Yes, Then Finally Left Richard Kind for Good

Here’s something nobody tells you when you start pulling at the thread of a celebrity marriage: sometimes the most interesting person in the story is the one who never wanted to be in the story at all.

Dana Stanley didn’t sign up for fame. I didn’t want it. Didn’t leverage it. Married one of the most recognizable character actors in American television, spent nineteen years going to charity galas and film premieres on his arm, raised three kids on the Upper West Side, ran a serious nonprofit fighting a terminal disease — and then, when the marriage ended, disappeared so completely that half the internet still can’t tell you her birthday, her hometown with certainty, or what she looks like right now.

That’s not a tragedy. That might actually be the most powerful move in this whole story.

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Detail	Info
Full Name	Dana Stanley Kind
Known For	Ex-wife of actor Richard Kind; Executive Director, Project ALS
Education	Columbia University
Originally From	Reportedly Lighthouse Point, Florida
Married	November 14, 1999
Separated	2014 (reconciled); Divorced 2018
Children	Three: Skyler (daughter), Samantha & Max (twins)
Best Man at Wedding	George Clooney (yes, that one)
Career	Nonprofit executive / fundraiser
Social Media	None confirmed
Current Status	Private; location: New York

She Said No First. That’s the Part Everyone Forgets.

The proposal story is famous enough in certain circles. Richard Kind, the guy who’s been in literally everything — Mad About You, Spin City, Argo, Inside Out, Curb Your Enthusiasm — hatched this whole elaborate plan built around his lucky number eight.

He dragged Dana to 18 W. 88th Street in New York City. At exactly eight minutes past eight o’clock, he dropped to one knee in front of the building.

She said no.

Just… no.

Think about that. George Clooney’s best friend, a working actor with a steady career and a clearly enormous amount of emotional preparation invested in this moment, and she looked at him and said no. She had second thoughts a month later.But still. The no happened first. And it tells you something about Dana Stanley that nobody who writes fluff pieces about her wants to sit with: she was not a woman who got swept away. She thought about it. She made a deliberate choice. Both times.

They married on November 14, 1999, in a ceremony at the Central Park Boathouse. George Clooney was the best man. Of course he was. Richard Kind and Clooney go way back — back to the days before Clooney was CLOONEY, back when they were just two guys in New York figuring it out. Kind later appeared in Clooney’s directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The friendship is real. So the best man gig wasn’t a showbiz performance. It was genuine.

But Dana. Dana’s the one nobody asks about enough.

Who She Actually Was, Before the Celebrity Wife Label Ate Everything

She grew up — reportedly, because nothing about her early life is confirmed with any certainty — in Lighthouse Point, Florida. I went to Columbia University. Graduated into a world where “nonprofit executive” wasn’t yet a cool thing to put on a LinkedIn profile, because LinkedIn didn’t exist yet.

She became a fundraiser for Project ALS. That’s the organization dedicated to raising money for research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — Lou Gehrig’s disease. The one that kills you by shutting down your motor neurons, slowly, relentlessly, until you can’t breathe. The one that has no cure. She spent her professional life trying to raise money to change that.

Eventually she became Executive Director of the organization.

Let that sit for a second. Not a board member who shows up four times a year. Not an honorary chairwoman who lends her name to galas. The Executive Director. The person who actually runs the operation. Coordinates the research strategy. Manages the fundraising. Keeps the lights on for scientists trying to solve one of medicine’s hardest problems.

While being married to a working actor with three kids at home on the Upper West Side.

This is not a woman who needed Richard Kind’s career to give her life meaning. She had her own mission. Her own identity. She just preferred to conduct it away from cameras.

The Marriage Years: Charity Galas and Carefully Maintained Privacy

For a decade and a half, they worked as a unit. Getty Images has dozens of shots of them together. The Project ALS annual benefit — “Tomorrow is Tonight” — was practically a standing date on their calendar. They showed up together to the 5th Annual Gala at Roseland Ballroom. The 13th Annual at Lucky Strike Lanes. The 15th Annual in 2012. She wasn’t just attending for the optics. She was running the thing.

They went to the A Serious Man premiere together in 2009. The 32nd Kennedy Center Honors. A charity fundraiser at Oheka Castle in 2011. I looked happy in photos. Looked like a team.

Meanwhile Richard Kind was quietly, consistently building one of the more unusual careers in Hollywood. Never the lead. Always there. The friend. The neighbor. The lawyer. The doctor. The guy you recognize but can’t quite place. He famously described himself as “parsley on a plate of meat and potatoes” — fine, even proud, to be the garnish while the stars got the attention.

He meant it as self-deprecation. But I’ve always thought there was something almost Buddhist about it. A man who genuinely made peace with his position. Who didn’t need to be Clooney. Who just wanted to work, raise his kids, and do good work with good people.

Maybe that shared sensibility — both of them operating in supporting roles to bigger causes — is what held them together. Her work was literally about other people’s survival. His work was literally about making other people look good.

2014: The First Crack Goes Public

January 2014. Richard Kind is at the Sundance Film Festival promoting Obvious Child. Closer Weekly corners him.

They’d reported, exclusively, that Kind and Stanley were separating after fourteen years.

His response: “I don’t want to talk about that.My children shouldn’t know.”

That line haunts me a little. Not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s so nakedly real. He’s not angry. He’s not in denial. He’s a father trying to protect three children — Skyler was eleven, the twins Samantha and Max were nine — from finding out their parents’ marriage was collapsing via a celebrity gossip magazine.

The statement they issued denied the separation. Said the reports were false. Everyone moved on.

But sources close to them, reported later, suggested they had in fact been on the edge. That there was a reconciliation. That it held for a while. Those things seemed okay.

They weren’t okay.

The Affair Rumors: Handle With Care

In late 2015, certain gossip outlets started reporting more specific claims. The reason for the trouble was Dana. That she had been involved with another man. That she had promised to end it and hadn’t. These reports named no one, cited anonymous sources, and have never been confirmed by either party.

I’ll be direct about this: I can’t verify those claims. Neither could most of the outlets running with them. The sourcing is the kind of thing that could be real or could be someone with an axe to grind feeding a story to a site that doesn’t ask too many questions.

What we know for certain: the marriage ended in 2018. They’d been together nineteen years. The split was described, again, as amicable. The reasons were never publicly shared by either Richard or Dana.

That’s it. That’s all there is.

Everything else is noise from gossip sites that have, shall we say, a financial incentive to make quiet divorces sound scandalous.

The Disappearing Act After 2018

When the divorce finalized in 2018, Dana Stanley did something that is actually quite difficult in the modern information ecosystem: she vanished.

No Instagram. No Twitter. No public appearances. No interviews. No profile pieces in Vogue or Real Simple about how she rebuilt her life. No dating rumors. No confirmed new relationship.

She just… stopped being a public figure. Which she had barely been in the first place.

She still lives in New York, according to the best information available. Still close to her kids, presumably — there’s no reason to think otherwise. Still doing her work in the nonprofit world, if she hasn’t moved on to something new. But there’s no way to know. She made herself unknowable on purpose.

There’s something genuinely admirable about that. We live in an era where everyone monetizes their divorce. Where the ex-wife of a moderately famous person at minimum gets a few podcast appearances and a ghost-written essay about healing. Dana Stanley took the rare third option: silence.

Richard Kind: The Guy Left Holding the Press Requests

After the divorce, Richard Kind kept working. Because of course he did. He’s been in everything — Inside Out as Bing Bong, the voice-over role that made grown adults cry in movie theaters. A Serious Man for the Coens. Argo. Only Murders in the Building. Mid-Century Modern. Poker Face. The man does not stop working.

He also got remarkably candid, in a 2025 CBS Sunday Morning interview, about the inner life underneath all those supporting roles. The body image stuff. The fat kid from New Jersey who learned to make people laugh so they wouldn’t make him cry first. The man who looked at Hollywood and said, essentially: I am the parsley. I am fine being the parsley.

That kind of self-awareness doesn’t come cheap. That’s the knowledge of someone who spent a long time figuring out who he actually was rather than who he wished he could be.

His kids — Skyler, Samantha, Max — are young adults now. He keeps them almost as private as their mother does. That feels like a co-parenting choice. Like two people who couldn’t make their marriage work but managed to agree, at least, on protecting the people who mattered most.

What Dana Stanley Actually Represents (My Take, For What It’s Worth)

Here’s the thing about celebrity adjacent women — the wives, ex-wives, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends — who didn’t become celebrities themselves: the culture has a weird relationship with them. Either they’re tragic footnotes, dismissed as background, or they get turned into villains when things go bad.

Dana Stanley refuses both categories.

She built a real career doing real work that matters. Executive Director of a nonprofit fighting a disease that still kills everyone it touches. That’s not a hobby. That’s a calling. She did it while raising three kids in Manhattan. Did it while going to the charity galas and the film premieres that came with the territory of being married to Richard Kind. Did it quietly, without generating a personal brand around her own goodness.

Then the marriage ended. She didn’t write a memoir. She didn’t go on Today. She didn’t relaunch herself as a wellness entrepreneur or a divorce coach.

She just kept living.

Maybe that’s the least flashy outcome imaginable. It’s also, in a very specific way, the most complete.

Final Words

There’s no dramatic ending to the Dana Stanley story because Dana Stanley didn’t want a dramatic ending. She wanted privacy, and she got it. She wanted a life that was hers, not a reflection of someone else’s, and she built that too — arguably even before the marriage ended. The woman ran a serious organization for a serious cause. She didn’t need the spotlight to tell her she was doing something that mattered.

Richard Kind is out there doing press, doing voice-overs, describing himself as the best parsley in Hollywood with that particular mix of sadness and acceptance that makes you want to hug him. His kids are grown. His career rolls on.

And Dana Stanley is somewhere in New York, being exactly as private as she wants to be.

Good for her. Genuinely.

FAQs

1. Who is Dana Stanley?

She’s the former wife of character actor Richard Kind, and the Executive Director of Project ALS, the nonprofit organization that funds research into ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).

2. When did Dana Stanley and Richard Kind get married?

November 14, 1999, at the Central Park Boathouse in New York City.

3. Who was the best man at their wedding?

George Clooney. Kind and Clooney have been genuine close friends for decades.

4. How many children do Dana and Richard have?

Three. A daughter named Skyler (born around 2002) and twins — a daughter named Samantha and a son named Max — born around 2005.

5. Why did they divorce?

Never publicly explained by either party. Officially, the breakup was characterized as amicable.Rumors from gossip outlets suggested an affair, but those were unconfirmed and sourced anonymously.

6. When did they officially separate?

There were separation rumors in January 2014, which both denied. They officially divorced in 2018 after nineteen years of marriage.

7. Did Dana Stanley ever have a public career before Project ALS?

Her background before Project ALS isn’t well-documented. She studied at Columbia University and was working as a fundraiser for ALS when she met Richard Kind in the late 1990s.

8. Where is Dana Stanley now?

She lives in New York, based on available information. She maintains no social media presence and has given no public interviews since the divorce.

9. Did Richard Kind say no to his proposal?

Kind proposed; Dana said no the first time. She changed her mind about a month later and said yes, leading to their 1997 engagement and 1999 wedding.

10. What is Project ALS?

A nonprofit organization dedicated to funding scientific research to find treatments and a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

11. Has Richard Kind remarried or dated publicly since the divorce?

As of mid-2026, no confirmed new relationship has been made public. He usually keeps his private life to himself.

12. Is Dana Stanley related to the entertainment industry?

Not in a professional capacity. She has worked almost exclusively in the nonprofit sector. Some aggregator sites falsely claimed she appeared on SNL or Curb Your Enthusiasm — those claims are AI-hallucinated nonsense with no basis in fact.

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