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| Birth Name(s) : Vera May Ralston |
Date of Birth: August 23, 1929 |
| Status:
Married
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Partner:
Bob Jones |
| Profession:
Actor |
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Full Vera Miles Biography
| Born in Oklahoma, Vera Miles attended school in Pratt, Kansas and Wichita, Kansas. Entering the beauty pageant circuit, she became "Miss Kansas" in 1948, and went to Hollywood soon after. She began landing small roles in minor films and in television. After a few such roles, she was cast by John Ford as the spunky ingenue in the Western classic Searchers, The (1956). More leading roles quickly followed, and for a brief period she shone in a number of major films. However much of her subsequent work, both in feature films and in television movies, has been in material considerably below her abilities. |
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Additional Vera Miles Biography
Miles was born to Burnice (née Wyrick) and Thomas Ralston. She 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.
Her success as a beauty queen prompted Miles move to Los Angeles where, in 1950, she soon began landing small roles in film and television, including a minor part as a chorus girl in Two Tickets to Broadway (1951), a musical starring Janet Leigh, with whom Miles would go on to co-star with nine years later in the classic Alfred Hitchcock film, Psycho. 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., Miles 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. Quote: "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 (they divorced in 1959).
Legendary motion picture director John Ford picked Miles 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 as the "greatest Western of all time" and the "13th greatest film of all time." Although Miles' other films that year included 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 up-swing in her career.
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 François 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."
In 1959, Miles and Van Johnson worked together again in Web of Evidence, which was adapted from A.J. Cronin's novel, Beyond This Place. She also 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 performance 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 (who compete for her attention), 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. She would play opposite John Wayne again in Hellfighters (1968). |
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