Vera Miles
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Vera Miles (born August 23, 1929) is an American actress.
She was born Vera Ralston in Boise City, Oklahoma, and grew up in Pratt and in Wichita, Kansas where, as a teenager, she worked nights as a Western Union operator-typist and graduated from Wichita North High School. She was crowned Miss Kansas in 1948.
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[edit] Early Career
Her success as a beauty queen prompted her move to Los Angeles where, in 1950, she soon began landing small roles in film and television including a minor part in as a chorus girl in Two Tickets to Broadway (1951), a musical starring Janet Leigh, with whom Miles would go on to co-star nine years later in Psycho for director Alfred Hitchcock. Attracting the attention of several producers, she was put under contract at various studios where she posed for cheesecake and publicity photographs, as was standard procedure for most up-and-coming Hollywood starlets of the era. Under contract starlet to Warner Bros., she was cast in films such as The Charge At Feather River in 3-D but lost out on doing a big 3-D hit starring Vincent Price House of Wax, for which she was considered. She said, "I was dropped by the best studios in town." In 1954, she wed her handsome and virile leading man from Tarzan's Hidden Jungle (1955), Gordon Scott, whom she divorced in 1959.
[edit] Served Two Masters
Legendary motion picture director John Ford handpicked her to star as Jeffrey Hunter's spirited love interest in The Searchers (1956), starring John Wayne, Natalie Wood, Ward Bond, and Dorothy Jordan. Widely considered one of the screen's definitive and most influential Westerns, The Searchers was recently voted by Entertainment Weekly the "greatest Western of all time" and the "13th greatest film of all time." Although Miles' other films that year include Autumn Leaves with Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson and 23 Paces to Baker Street with Van Johnson, it was The Searchers that accounted for a dramatic upswing in her career.
A year later, Miles began a five-year personal contract to Alfred Hitchcock and was widely publicized as the director's potential successor to the sophisticated and supremely elegant cool blonde Grace Kelly. Miles' new mentor directed her in the role of the emotionally troubled new bride of Ralph Meeker in a memorable episode of his popular television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents titled "Revenge." Suitably impressed, Hitchcock directed her on the big screen in another strong performance as the beleaguered wife of Henry Fonda, who played a New York musician falsely accused of a crime in The Wrong Man (1957). New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, writing of the performances of Miles and her esteemed costar Fonda, singled out Miles' performance for greater praise, writing that she "does convey a poignantly pitiful sense of fear of the appalling situation into which they have been cast."
Hitchcock responded not only to Miles' blonde, patrician beauty and intelligent sex appeal but also to her very obvious acting talent. He undertook a reinvention of his new star through grooming and wardrobe supervised by Oscar winning costume designer Edith Head. In a 1956 feature article in Look magazine, Miles said of Hitchcock, "He has never complimented me, or even told me why he signed me." Hitchcock commented in the same article, "She's an attractive, intelligent and sexy woman. That about rolls it up." In a far more effusive mood, he told a reporter, referring to the similarities between Miles and Grace Kelly, "I feel the same way directing Vera that I did with Grace. She has a style, an intelligence, and a quality of understatement."
[edit] Losing A Role Designed to Make Her A Star
Production delays and her pregnancy cost Miles the dual leading role in the project Hitchcock designed as a showcase for his new star, Vertigo (1958), a film considered by many to be one of the director's masterworks. Miles recalled that when she told Hitchcock that she could not star in his deeply personal and melancholic thriller for which costumes and makeup tests had already been completed, "He was overwhelmed." The director replaced Miles with Kim Novak, with whom he clashed. When asked years later about Miles by director Francois Truffaut in the book Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitchcock explained their professional falling-out this way: "She became pregnant just before the part that was going to turn her into a star. After that, I lost interest. I couldn't get the rhythm going with her again." Miles reflected, "Over the span of years, he's had one type of woman in his films, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, and so on. Before that, it was Madeleine Carroll. I'm not their type and never have been. I tried to please him but I couldn't. They are all sexy women, but mine is an entirely different approach."
[edit] After Losing "Vertigo"
She co-starred with Susan Hayward and John Gavin in the glossy melodrama about adultery, Back Street, directed by David Miller and based on the much-filmed 1931 novel by Fannie Hurst. A year later, Hitchcock cast her as Janet Leigh's sister Lila Crane in Psycho (1960), in which her character discovers the shocking truth about Norman Bates and his mother. Miles, while making the thriller, called it "the weirdy of all times." Despite her role being a supportive one, Miles' tense, tightly-coiled perfomance made a strong and lasting impression.
Following another stint in another classic John Ford film with 1962's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, opposite no less than John Wayne and James Stewart, she won a Bronze Wrangler citation from Western Heritage Awards, which she shared with director Ford, writer James Warner Bellah and her fellow actors, including Lee Marvin and Edmond O'Brien.
Miles' career took an unexpected turn when she landed her first roles at the Disney studio, in A Tiger Walks (1964), Those Calloways (1965), and Follow Me, Boys! (1966). She continued to play roles for Disney into the 1970s. She did extensive television series work for years, then in 1983 reprised her famous role in Psycho II, with her character vociferously protesting the proposed parole of Norman Bates (played, as in the original, by Anthony Perkins). In later years, she lamented that Psycho had become the film with which Hitchcock's name remained most associated in the eyes of the public, considering that he had directed so many other superior films.
