Vera Miles
Vera Miles (born 1929) is an American actress. She was born Vera Ralston in Oklahoma, and grew up in Pratt and in Wichita, Kansas where she graduated from Wichita North High School. She became
Miss Kansas in 1948.
Her career as a beauty queen earned a minor part in Two Tickets to Broadway (1951). She posed for cheesecake photos, and married her leading man from Tarzan's Hidden Jungle (1955), Gordon Scott (they later split). Then John Ford cast her as Jeffrey Hunter's spirited love interest in The Searchers (1956), and her career took a dramatic turn upward. A year later, she played Henry Fonda's beleaguered wife in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1957).
Pregnancy cost her the lead in Vertigo but Hitchcock did cast her as Janet Leigh's sister Lila Crane in Psycho (1960), in which her character discovers the truth about Norman Bates' mother. Following another stint for Ford in 1962's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance she got her first parts at the Disney studio, in A Tiger Walks (1964) and Those Calloways (1965). She continued to play roles in Disney into the 1970s. She did television series work for a time, then in 1983 she reprised her most famous role in Psycho II, with her character Lila vociferously protesting the proposed parole of killer Norman Bates (played, as in the original, by Anthony Perkins).
Note: This profile was written in or before 2005.
Vera Miles Facts
Selected Filmography
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection |
Psycho |
Smashup On Interstate 5 |
Hellfighters |
Alfred Hitchcock: The Essentials Collection |
TCM Greatest Classic Legends: James Stewart |
Psycho II |
The Searchers |
4-Movie Midnight Marathon Pack: Psychos |
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