Vera McCord

• Name — Vera McCord • Born — 1872 • Birthplace — Marshalltown, Iowa, U.S. • Died — 3 March 1949 • Place of death — Bellevue Hospital, New York City, U.S. • Occupation — Actress, screenwriter, film director • Years Active — 19021940

Vera McCord was born in Marshalltown, Iowa (the date varies in sources), the daughter of George Brown McCord and Clara Sophrona Smalley McCord. Her father was a veteran of the American Civil War, and her mother was said to be a niece of American president Andrew Jackson. She moved to Oakland, California with her family as a girl, and attended Snell's Women's Seminary in Berkeley, California.

McCord began acting during an extended visit to London. She performed in The President (1902) and When We Were Twenty-One (1903), and gave dramatic recitations there. She appeared in three plays on Broadway: Via Wireless (1908-1909) with Edwin Arden, The Flag Lieutenant (1909), and The Zebra (1911). 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."

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

In 1929 McCord sued a wealthy Chicago banker, Maurice Rothschild, for breach of promise, contending that he promised to marry her and then did not. She lost the suit in 1931, after her brother testified for the defense that "his sister was inclined to drink to excess". She denied his claim that she drank too much, saying "I have my brother to blame for everything. I have never been drunk in my life." McCord died at New York's Bellevue Hospital in 1949, "after a long illness", according to her New York Times obituary.