Vera Miles

Vera Miles

Infobox actor


imagesize = 250px
caption = from the trailer for "The Wrong Man" (1957)
birthname = Vera June Ralston
birthdate = birth date and age|1929|8|23
birthplace = Boise City, Oklahoma, U.S.
spouse = Bob Miles (1948-1954)
Gordon Scott (1954-1959)
Keith Larsen (1960-1971)
awards = Walk of Fame - Television
1650 Vine Street

Vera Miles (born Vera June Ralston; August 23, 1929) is an American actress known from such classic films as "The Searchers", "Psycho" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance".

Biography

Early life

Miles was born in Boise City, Oklahoma, the daughter of Burnice (née Wyrick) and Thomas Ralston. [http://www.filmreference.com/film/0/Vera-Miles.html Vera Miles Biography (1930-) ] ] [ [http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/contributor/1800017695/bio Vera Miles Biography - Yahoo! Movies ] ] 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.

Career: 1950-57

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 in another strong performance as the emotionally devastated 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 co-star 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 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."

Career: 1958-95

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), 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". 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.

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. Following another stint in another classic John Ford film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962), 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).

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 then continued extensive work in television, before reprising her most famous role of Lila Crane in "Psycho II" in 1983. This sequel saw Miles' character vociferously protesting the proposed parole of Norman Bates (played, as in the original, by Anthony Perkins). 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, considering that he had directed so many other superior films.

Throughout the 1980s and mid-1990s, Miles continued to work in both television and film, before retiring from acting in 1995.

Currently residing in California, she refuses any public relations (including interviews, public appearances, etc.), and has maintained a very low profile since her retirement.

See also

Millicent Barnes, Mirror Image, Twilight Zone

References

External links

*imdb name|id=0587256|name=Vera Miles
* [http://www.misskansas.org/meetmiss/1948/ Vera J. Ralston]


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