Vera Miles

Vera Miles
from the trailer for The Wrong Man (1957)
Born	Vera June Ralston August 23, 1929 (1929-08-23) (age 80) Boise City, Oklahoma, U.S.
Years active	1950–1995
Spouse(s)	Bob Miles (1948–1954) Gordon Scott (1954–1959) Keith Larsen (1960–1971)

Vera Miles (born Vera June Ralston; August 23, 1929) is an American film actress who gained popularity for starring in films such as Psycho, The Searchers, The Wrong Man and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Psycho II.

Early life

Miles was born in Boise City, Oklahoma, the daughter of Burnice (née Wyrick) and Thomas Ralston.^[1][2] 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 (1947). She was crowned Miss Kansas in 1948.

Career

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. These included 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 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 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. She once recalled: "I was dropped by the best studios in town." In Tarzan's Hidden Jungle, filmed in 1954 and released in 1955, she played Tarzan's love interest (not named "Jane" in this film). In 1954, she wed the muscular actor who had played Tarzan, 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. 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 upswing in her career.

A year later, Miles began a five-year personal contract with 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 alongside 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 singled out Miles' performance, writing that she "does convey a poignantly pitiful sense of fear of the appalling situation into which they have been cast". Hitchcock 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."

Production delays and her pregnancy (a son, Michael, with then-husband Gordon Scott) cost Miles the dual leading role in the project Hitchcock designed as a showcase for his new star, Vertigo (1958). 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. A year later, Hitchcock cast her as Lila Crane in Psycho (1960), in which her character discovers the truth about Norman Bates and his mother. Miles, while making the thriller, called it "the weirdy of all times".

On January 7, 1960, Miles appeared as Jenny Breckenridge in the "Miss Jenny" episode of Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater Western television series on CBS, opposite Ben Cooper in the role of Darryl Thompson and Jack Elam as Little Jimmy Lehigh.^[3]

She also co-starred with Susan Hayward and John Gavin in a glossy remake of the melodrama about adultery, Back Street (1961), directed by David Miller and based on the much-filmed 1931 novel by Fannie Hurst.

Then came a stint in another John Ford western film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), opposite 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 Wayne again in Hellfighters (1968).

In 1962 and 1963, she appeared on NBC's medical drama about psychiatry, The Eleventh Hour, in two episodes entitled "Beauty Playing a Mandolin Underneath a Willow Tree", as Kate Sommers, and "Ann Costigan: A Duel on a Field of White", as the title character Ann.^[4]

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.

Miles did extensive work in television, including the portrayal of a homicidal beauty-products mogul in an episode of Columbo, before reprising her most famous role of Lila Crane in Psycho II in 1983. In later years, Miles lamented that Psycho had become the film with which Hitchcock's name remained most associated with in the eyes of the public.

Throughout the 1980s and thereafter, Miles continued to work in both television and film until her retirement in 1995.

Personal life

Miles resides in California and refuses any public relations offers (including interviews and public appearances) and has maintained a low profile since her retirement.

Miles' first husband was Bob Miles; they were wed from 1948-1954 and had two daughters: Debra Miles, born in 1950, and Kelley Miles, born in 1952.

After their divorce, she was married to Gordon Scott from 1954 until 1959, and they had one son, Michael Scott, born in 1957.

Upon that divorce, she was married to actor Keith Larsen from 1960 until 1971, and they had one son, Erik Larsen, born in Burbank, California on April 30, 1961. Larsen remarried after their divorce in 1971, but Miles remains single.^[3]

See also

• Millicent Barnes, Mirror Image, Twilight Zone

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Vera Miles

• Vera Miles at the Internet Movie Database
• Vera J. Ralston