2013 Essays

Vera McCord

Lane, Christina

Theatrical actress Vera McCord wrote, produced, and directed her one and only independent feature motion picture, the semi-scandalous The Good-Bad Wife, in 1921. She had had a relatively short theatrical career between 1912 and 1914 in Oakland, California, after a seven-year stint on the stage in London before her one producing gamble. What else we know of McCord’s life is that she was born in 1872 in Marshalltown, Iowa. The daughter of the town’s deputy sheriff, she, her parents, and her two brothers eventually moved to central California, where her father took up real estate. As a young woman, she enrolled at Snell’s Women’s Seminary in Berkeley, and later took a single course at Emerson College in Boston. It was on a trip to England and Paris “under the chaperonage of [one] Lady Lewds,” according to an Oakland Tribune article in 1914, that she developed her theatrical skills (28).