Vera McCord

McCord began acting during an extended visit in London.[6] She performed in The President (1902)[7] and When We Were Twenty-One (1903), and gave dramatic recitations there.[8] She appeared in three plays on Broadway: Via Wireless (1908-1909) with Edwin Arden,[9] The Flag Lieutenant (1909),[10] and The Zebra (1911).[11] Of her 1908 Broadway debut, the New York Star critic wrote that "Miss Vera McCord is a new leading woman with 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."[12]

In 1913 she appeared in a silent film, Broncho Billy’s Mistake (1913). In 1914, she was in a play in Salt Lake City, Just Like a Woman.[13] In 1916 she made films with dancer and artist Lolita Perine, Mona, the Spirit of the Heights and The Lure of Venus, which included scenes of female nudity, "Venus, clothed only in the crystal atmosphere of Marin County," as one San Francisco newspaper explained. The scenes were cut and the films went unfinished in the legal entanglements that followed.[14][15]

She formed her own production company in 1917,[16] and directed and produced one silent film, The Good-Bad Wife (1921), based on "The Wild Fawn", a story by Mary Imlay Taylor.[17] The film was considered controversial for its focus on a woman who wears dresses, smokes, and attempts suicide, but still finds a happy resolution in a respectable second marriage. The film's cast also includes two African-American comedians (Pauline Dempsey and J. Wesley Jenkins) and a Chinese actress (Moe Lee).[5][18]

She was founder and president of the National Club for Better Movies.[19] Later in life, she taught speech and acting.[5] She bought the rights to the dramatic adaptation of Booth Tarkington's The Man on Horseback in 1940,[20][21] a show she had performed in San Francisco in 1912.[22]