Vera Miles - Career

Career

Miles moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1950 and landed small roles in films and television, including a minor role as a chorus girl in Two Tickets to Broadway (1951), a musical starring Janet Leigh, with whom Miles co-starred nine years later in the classic Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho. Miles was eventually put under contract at various studios. She once recalled, "I was dropped by the best studios in town."

While under contract to Warner Brothers, Miles was cast in Tarzan's Hidden Jungle, released in 1955, as Tarzan's love interest. During filming, she married her Tarzan co-star, Gordon Scott. They divorced in 1959.

Director John Ford chose Miles to star as Jeffrey Hunter's love interest in The Searchers (1956), starring John Wayne. In the same year Miles also co-starred in 23 Paces to Baker Street with Van Johnson. A year later, Miles began a five-year personal contract with Alfred Hitchcock and was widely publicized as the director's potential successor to Grace Kelly. Miles' new mentor directed her in the role of Ralph Meeker's emotionally troubled new bride in Revenge, the pilot episode of his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Suitably impressed, Hitchcock directed her on the big screen alongside Henry Fonda, who played a musician falsely accused of a crime, in The Wrong Man (1956). 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 to reinvent his new star through grooming and wardrobe supervised by Oscar-winning costume designer Edith Head.

Production delays and her pregnancy cost Miles the leading role opposite James Stewart in Vertigo (1958), the project Hitchcock designed as a showcase for his new star (the role which eventually went to Kim Novak). When asked several years later about Miles by director François Truffaut for 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".

Despite their differences, Hitchcock cast Miles in what is arguably the role for which she is most remembered, that of Lila Crane in Psycho, playing the sister of the character who is stabbed to death in the shower at the Bates Motel. Miles referred to the 1960 thriller as "the weirdy of all times". In 1962, she worked with John Ford again on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

On October 4, 1960, Miles appeared in the episode "Three Rode West" of NBC's Laramie western television series in the role of Annie Andrews, a woman seeking a husband. When the outlaw Frank Skinner, played by Myron Healey, admits that he will not marry her, Annie set her sights on series character Slim Sherman (John Smith), who is not interested in marriage either but is looking for Skinner, for whom he had earlier ridden shotgun on the stagecoach. Skinner thereafter robbed the stage of its $10,000 shipment and shot to death Jack Adams, played by Ross Elliott, the manager of the stage line in Rockland City. Skinner tries to use Annie to lure Sherman into an ambush. The episode also features Denver Pyle as a sheriff, who is suspicious of Slim.

In 1963, Miles co-starred in the first episode of ABC's The Fugitive titled "Fear in a Desert City."

In 1965, Miles played a supporting role in several episodes of the television series My Three Sons (CBS), which starred Fred MacMurray. In 1966, Miles co-starred with Fred MacMurray in the Walt Disney film Follow Me, Boys!. In 1968, she played John Wayne's estranged wife in the movie Hellifghters. She played a cosmetics queen who commits murder in "Lovely but Lethal," a 1973 episode of NBC's Columbo.

In 1983, two decades after the original film, Miles reprised the role of Lila for Psycho II. Throughout the 1980s until her retirement in 1995, Miles continued to work in both television and film.

In 2012, Miles was portrayed by Jessica Biel in the film Hitchcock.