Born: 16 July 1900, United Kingdom
Died: 30 May 1990
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Audrey Humphries, Audrey Stanley, Audrey Rivers
The following is excerpted from a 2025 interview with Dr. Zoë Burgess, Senior Research Fellow at the University of West London’s London School of Film, Media and Design, and Film Curator at Wessex Film and Sound Archive.
On the surface of it before I undertook this research, Audrey, I thought was one of these women who had lots and lots of money, had big country houses, and was producing films, mainly of the domestic sphere, sometimes at the community. So what you tend to find with the typical woman amateur, there tends to be a domestic focus with the reaching out into community activities and chronicling what’s going on in the local area. So before I watched Audrey’s films, I think I thought she was that kind of person, because I guess, looking at the catalogue entry, you tend to make a judgement call, whether you want to or not, about the kind of filmmaker you think that this person is going to be. So actually, what I found with Audrey that she was very, very different from what I thought she would be. So I found myself like, well, that serves me right for making assumptions based on face value. You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Audrey actually came from very modest, humble beginnings, really. Her father was a civil servant, they didn’t have any domestic servants, and they actually took in lodgers when Audrey was a child. So money was something that had a lot of value, it was a need within their family. Audrey, I think had two sisters, and she married really well in the early 1920s. So she married into a publishing company, her first husband was the son of a publisher in the Reading area. And she was married for some time, and she was fairly active on a sporting social scene. She doesn’t really appear any in any society magazines, which was one of the key indicators of people of particular standing within society, like some of the other filmmakers I’ve covered. But then she actually changed her circumstances significantly. I think she divorced from her first husband, I haven’t found the divorce records, but we know they separated in the early 1930s. And then through her sister’s connection, her sister had married into the Drummond family, which was a royally connected family with big land holdings, very wealthy. And so her sister had married into this environment. And Audrey managed to make a connection as a result of her sister’s new marriage. So then Audrey married incredibly well. She married Ronald Sloan Stanley, who was active in the court circles, so they had connections to royalty, and active on the yachting scene on the south coast as well. So she significantly changed her social standing as a result of this. And it’s at this point that she starts using cine.
So she married Ronald in 1937. And it’s around that time that she acquired a cine camera. And she starts using a 16 millimetre camera almost straight away, and almost exclusively colour film, which was incredibly expensive. So I keep talking about things being expensive. Black and white film was more affordable than colour film. So for the 1930s, if you find a filmmaker who is using lots and lots of colour film, it automatically tells you a little bit about their financial background. You can understand what they were spending their money on, what their priorities were. Audrey actually toured with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, George Leveson Gower, who’s one of the first chairmen of the British Film Institute. And so she toured on his yacht with him and his family, and she charts her travels in in the films that she makes. And actually, what we find is that Audrey was using the camera as a way to mediate and navigate the social situations. So she’s there capturing the people that she’s travelling with, who would have been new social superiors in many senses that she was trying to integrate with. So the camera for her serves this purpose of connection and withdrawal. So she’s connecting with the people that she’s filming, they’re laughing and joking with her as she’s behind the camera. But at the same time, she’s at one remove from them. So it provides this safety barrier, this safety net, which I think would have been a really helpful tactic for her to begin to integrate into this new social set. Because I imagine, obviously, I don’t know, because I haven’t spoken to her. I imagine it would have been quite intimidating, really introducing yourself to this entirely new echelon of society. And actually having the cine camera seems to have been her way in. It was this way into integrating, involving herself into the social situations. So I think she is really interesting as a character.