The ‘Hitchcock blonde’ who “wasn’t interested” in being his muse: “He wanted to make me a superstar”
As one of cinema’s most innovative and influential auteurs, Alfred Hitchcock had plenty of on and off-camera tricks up his sleeve that he’d deploy onscreen, but his career-long obsession with blonde bombshells was much more personal than professional.
Once the ‘Master of Suspense’ had cast his first fair-haired female lead, The 39 Steps‘ Madeleine Carroll, it became a fixture of his filmography. While several of them worked with the filmmaker on multiple productions, his exacting demands and off-putting behaviour didn’t always create an ideal environment.
Tippi Hedren is the most obvious and notable example, with the star of The Birds and Marnie making it abundantly clear that Hitchcock had sabotaged her career. She was signed to an exclusive contract with the director, which gave him far too much power and sway over her trajectory, which she came to regret.
Saboteur‘s Priscilla Lane, Vertigo‘s Kim Novak, North by Northwest‘s Eva Marie Saint, Psycho‘s Janet Leigh, and even the brunette Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound and Notorious are among the names who carried on Hitchcock’s tradition, but it became readily apparent that Grace Kelly was his favourite of them all.
She was the only blonde-haired leading lady to appear in three of his pictures, and there would have undoubtedly been many more after Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief if she hadn’t left her acting career behind to become real-life royalty. This being Hitchcock, he decided that he’d try and find the next best thing; somebody he could mould into Kelly’s ready-made replacement.
That’s when he settled on Vera Miles. 1956 was her breakout year, with the actor appearing in both Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man and John Ford’s The Searchers, and she signed a five-year contract with the filmmaker the following year. She was supposed to play Novak’s part in Vertigo, but pregnancy ruled her out, scuppering his big plans to turn her into Grace Kelly V2.0.
Even though they’d work together again on Psycho, where she played Lila Crane, rumours abounded that the relationship between Hitchcock and Miles had soured, and that he held a personal grudge against her for daring to focus on family over her career. She denied the scuttlebutt, though, but did admit the ‘Master of Suspense’ was desperate to stuff her into a box she didn’t want to be in.
“It is true, I suppose, that Hitchcock had a bit of a Pygmalion complex,” she told The Spokesman-Review. “He wanted to make me into a superstar, but I just wasn’t interested. It was soon after he’d lost Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier.” Reflecting on their first meeting, Miles hinted that “he may have wanted to make another Grace Kelly out of me.”
Some stars would jump at the chance, but she had other priorities. “He assigned me the job of entering society on the jet-set level,” Miles explained. “I have nothing against society, but it just wasn’t me. I was a working mother, busy raising my children, and my private life has never been discussable.” That was pretty much the opposite of what Hitchcock wanted, and after Psycho, they never worked together again, and it can’t be ruled out that he did that deliberately out of spite, based on his track record.
