Vera McCord

Vera McCord (born c. 1872, Marshalltown, Iowa — died March 3, 1949, New York City) was an American stage actress, film director, and producer whose career spanned stage work on both sides of the Atlantic and early silent cinema. Her father, George Brown McCord, was a veteran of the American Civil War, and her mother, Clara Sophrona Smalley McCord, was said to be a niece of President Andrew Jackson. As a girl, McCord relocated with her family to Oakland, California, and later attended Snell's Women's Seminary in Berkeley.

McCord's acting career began during an extended stay in London, where she performed in The President in 1902 and When We Were Twenty-One in 1903, and also gave dramatic recitations. Her Broadway debut came in 1908 with Via Wireless, in which she appeared alongside Edwin Arden and which ran into 1909. A critic for the New York Star wrote of that debut that McCord possessed "such naturalness and utter absence of the theatric in her method that she scarcely seems to act at all, so realistically does she seem to live the part." She went on to appear in two additional Broadway productions: The Flag Lieutenant in 1909 and The Zebra in 1911. In 1912 she performed in a San Francisco production of Booth Tarkington's The Man on Horseback, the dramatic rights to which she purchased in 1940.

McCord's work in film began in 1913 with an appearance in the silent picture Broncho Billy's Mistake. In 1916 she collaborated with dancer and artist Lolita Perine on two films, Mona, the Spirit of the Heights and The Lure of Venus, both of which included scenes of female nudity. The footage was cut and the productions remained unfinished following legal complications. Having formed her own production company in 1917, McCord wrote, directed, and produced the silent film The Good-Bad Wife in 1921, adapting it from "The Wild Fawn," a story by Mary Imlay Taylor. The film drew attention for its depiction of a woman who wears dresses, smokes, and attempts suicide, yet ultimately finds resolution in a second marriage. Its cast included African-American comedians Pauline Dempsey and J. Wesley Jenkins, as well as Chinese actress Moe Lee.

Beyond her performing and filmmaking work, McCord served as founder and president of the National Club for Better Movies, and in later life taught speech and acting. In 1929 she filed a breach-of-promise suit against Chicago banker Maurice Rothschild, alleging he had promised to marry her and then withdrew; she lost the case in 1931. McCord died at Bellevue Hospital in New York in 1949 following a long illness.