Date of Birth : Aug 23rd 1929
American film actress popular for playing in such films as The Searchers, Psycho, The Wrong Man and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. 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.
CAREER
Psycho II ( 1983 )
Psycho ( 1960 )