List of Famous people with last name Orkney

Connie Gilchrist was a British child artist's model, actress, dancer and singer who, at a very early age, attracted the attention of the painters Frederic Leighton, Frank Holl, William Powell Frith and James McNeill Whistler, the writer and photographer Lewis Carroll and aristocrats, Lord Lonsdale and the Duke of Beaufort. She became a popular attraction on stage at the age of 12 in a skipping rope dance routine at London's Gaiety Theatre, where she was then engaged in Victorian burlesque and vaudeville throughout her formative years. Gilchrist, who became known as the "original Gaiety Girl", had abandoned the stage by the time of her marriage in 1892 to Edmond Walter FitzMaurice, 7th Earl of Orkney.

Robert Stewart, 1st Earl of Orkney and Lord of Zetland (Shetland) was a recognised illegitimate son of James V, King of Scotland, and his mistress Eupheme Elphinstone. Robert Stewart was half-brother to Mary, Queen of Scots and uncle to James VI and I of Scotland and England.

Field Marshal George Hamilton, 1st Earl of Orkney, KT, styled Lord George Hamilton from 1666 to 1696, was a British soldier and Scottish nobleman and the first British Army officer to be promoted to the rank of field marshal. After commanding a regiment for the cause of William of Orange during the Williamite War in Ireland, he commanded a regiment in the Low Countries during the Nine Years' War. He then led the final assault at the Battle of Blenheim attacking the village churchyard with eight battalions of men and then receiving the surrender of its French defenders during the War of the Spanish Succession. He also led the charge of fifteen infantry battalions in an extremely bloody assault on the French entrenchments at the Battle of Malplaquet. In later life he became a Lord of the Bedchamber to George I and was installed as Governor of Edinburgh Castle.

Thomas John Hamilton FitzMaurice, 5th Earl of Orkney was the son of John FitzMaurice, Viscount Kirkwall and grandson of Mary FitzMaurice, 4th Countess of Orkney. British prime minister, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, William Petty-FitzMaurice was his great uncle.

Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, Lord of Roslin was a Scottish and a Norwegian nobleman. Sinclair held the title Earl of Orkney under the King of Norway. He was sometimes identified by another spelling of his surname, St. Clair. He was the grandfather of William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness, the builder of Rosslyn Chapel. He was best known today because of a modern legend that he took part in explorations of Greenland and North America almost 100 years before Christopher Columbus. William Thomson, in his book The New History of Orkney, wrote: "It has been Earl Henry's singular fate to enjoy an ever-expanding posthumous reputation which has very little to do with anything he achieved in his lifetime."

Oliver Peter St John, 9th Earl of Orkney is a retired Canadian political scientist and Scottish peer. He was a lecturer at University College London, England, before moving to the University of Manitoba, Canada, where he rose to become professor of political studies. He retired from academia in 1998, the year he succeeded to the Earldom of Orkney, and was appointed a senior scholar by Manitoba.

Thorfinn Torf-Einarsson also known as Thorfinn Skull-splitter was a 10th-century Earl of Orkney. He appears in the Orkneyinga saga and briefly in St Olaf's Saga, as incorporated into the Heimskringla. These stories were first written down in Iceland in the early 13th century and much of the information they contain is "hard to corroborate".

Elizabeth Hamilton, Countess of Orkney was an English courtier from the Villiers family and the reputed mistress of William III & II, King of England and Scotland, from 1680 until 1695. She was a lady-in-waiting to his wife and co-monarch, Queen Mary II.

Saint Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney, sometimes known as Magnus the Martyr, was Earl of Orkney from 1106 to about 1115.