MovieChat Forums > Vertigo (1958) Discussion > Vera Miles

Vera Miles

posted 10 years ago by mercury4
5 replies | jump to latest

I read Hitch really wanted her for this role and he was furious when she got pregnant and couldn't do it. I think the movie would've been very different, but I could really see her in the part. What sold me on Vera Miles playing the Kim Novak part in Vertigo were two things I saw her do on TV. There was an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents titled Revenge. I also saw her in a Twilight Zone episode called Mirror Image. In both of these shows she played characters that were very haunted for different reasons. Don't get me wrong. I loved Kim Novak in Vertigo. But I read that Hitchcock wanted Vera Miles for the part. I think she would've been very good. I wonder if Vera Miles ever regretted not starring in Vertigo.

[–] s007davis 10 years ago

The following photo is a shot of Vera doing a wardrobe test as Madeleine for Vertigo:

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3664/3608153948_f08d24127d_z.jpg?zz=1

[–] gbennett5 9 years ago

The film is perfect, and while I mean no disrespect to Novack, there is
no question Miles was just as beautiful and an incomparably better
actor. It's really too bad she didn't do it. But Novack, a serviceable
actor, pulled it off nonetheless. You can't argue with success.

[–] UdoConstantini (117) 4 years ago

For a long time I was mystified by Hitchcock's insistence on Vera Miles, but I really only knew her from "Psycho", where she just struck me as anti-septic. Then I saw The Wrong Man, and I got why he saw her as right for the role in Vertigo. We'll never know how Miles would have been, but I think Novak was marvelous in Vertigo.

[–] liscarkat (19031) 4 years ago

Miles was more attractive than Novak and a better actress.

[–] Otter (24464) 4 years ago

Well, just about everyone was a better actress than Novak, if you don't count "Vertigo"! Novak was normally pretty weak, but in "Vertigo", she knocked it out of the park! And personally I've never been impressed with Miles, she was moderately attractive and moderately talented but no more.

For a long time I thought Eva Marie Saint should have played the role, but I've changed my mind. Saint would have been a better Madeline than a Judy, she was so frail and vulnerable, but with Novak it's the other way around. Novak was never 100% convincing as the fragile Madeline, and I was kind of disappointed with her the first time I saw the film... but that's how it should be! Madeline is a sham and not a very good one, nobody would be fooled by her except a lonely, horny, unstable, and desperate old fool like Ferguson. But Novak is achingly real as the trashy, guilt-ridden, desperate Judy, in a way that few actresses of that era could be. The movie studios polished the realness out of most of them, or at least the kind of low-rent realness it took to play a slutty shopgirl convincingly.