Frederick Pope Stamper (20 November 1877 – 12 November 1950), usually credited as F. Pope Stamper or F. Pope-Stamper, less often as Pope Stamper, was an English stage and film actor who appeared mostly in Edwardian musical comedy.
Born at Hammersmith in 1877,[1] Stamper was a stage actor both before and after appearing in silent movies. He had little screen work after the arrival of the "talkies".
In 1902, at Lambeth, he married Daisy Leahy,[2] an Irish chorus girl and actress who used the stage name of Daisy Le Hay.[3]
In 1907 he appeared in the musical comedy Miss Hook of Holland at the Prince of Wales Theatre, creating the role of the Bandmaster; the musical enjoyed a run of 462 performances.[4] [5] In 1911 he appeared in a Charles Frohman production of The Siren at the Knickerbocker Theatre on Broadway, and the same year he played Captain Charteris in A Quiet Girl, at New York's Park Theatre, with a run of 240 performances.[6]
Stamper was a good golfer, but while in New York with a leading role in the Broadway production of The Dollar Princess, he played a round of golf with a Miss Melrose at the Dunwoodie Country Club, in Yonkers, injured the lady by slicing a drive, and faced a claim which was reported as a notable case on the law of torts.[7]
Stamper had a brother, Charles William Stamper, who was motor engineer to King Edward VII, and a son, Henry Lionel Pope Stamper (1906–1985), who enraged his father by abandoning a job his father had got for him in the City of London to become an unsuccessful repertory actor. His granddaughter Rosemary Stamper is the mother of the comedian Jack Dee.[8]