Vera Gordon

Vera Pogorelsky Gordon (June 11, 1886 – May 8, 1948) was a Russian-born American actress who worked in both stage and film. Born in Ekaterinoslav, Russia, to Boris Pogorelsky and Teigan Nemirovsky, she began performing as a child but was dismissed from the Shevchenko Imperial Company after its directors discovered she was Jewish.

In 1904, while still in Russia, she married Nathan A. Gordon, a producer and writer at the Ostoffersk Acting Company. The couple had two children, William, born in 1904, and Nadje, born in 1907. The family relocated to New York City in 1905, where Gordon built her early stage career performing at smaller venues including the Liberty and the Lyric theaters on the Lower East Side. In 1916 she traveled to England for a tour that included appearances in both vaudeville and theatre.

Gordon's Broadway career spanned 1917 to 1918, during which she appeared in three productions: The Gentile Wife, Why Worry?, and The Land of the Free. Her screen career began in 1920 and extended across more than two decades. Among her notable film roles were Mama Kantor in Humoresque (1920), Rosie Potash in Potash and Perlmutter (1923) and its 1924 sequel In Hollywood with Potash and Perlmutter, and Mrs. Cohen in The Cohens and Kellys (1926) and its several sequels set in Paris, Atlantic City, Scotland, and Africa. She appeared in Stage Door Canteen (1943) playing herself, and her final screen credit was Abie's Irish Rose in 1946.

Beyond performing, Gordon contributed writing on marriage and children to newspapers and magazines and supported Jewish children's orphanages. She held memberships in Actors' Equity Association, the Russian-American Art Club of Los Angeles, and the Grand Street Boys of New York. Her nephew was the musicologist and violinist Sol Babitz, and her great-niece was the writer Eve Babitz.

The Gordons moved from New York to California in 1926, residing at 364 S. Highland Avenue in Los Angeles. Gordon later settled in Beverly Hills, where she died on May 8, 1948. She is buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood.