She was born Vera Ralston in Oklahoma, and grew up in Pratt and in Wichita, Kansas where she graduated from Wichita North High School. She became "Miss Kansas" in 1948.

Her career as a beauty queen earned a minor part in Two Tickets to Broadway (1951). She posed for cheesecake photos, and married her leading man from Tarzan's Hidden Jungle (1955), Gordon Scott, whom she later divorced. John Ford cast her as Jeffrey Hunter's spirited love interest in The Searchers (1956), and her career took a dramatic turn upward. A year later, she played Henry Fonda's beleaguered wife in Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1957).

Pregnancy cost her the lead in Vertigo but Hitchcock did cast her as Janet Leigh's sister Lila Crane in Psycho (1960), in which her character discovers the truth about Norman Bates' mother. Following another stint for Ford in 1962's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance she got her first parts at the Disney studio, in A Tiger Walks (1964), Those Calloways (1965), and Follow Me, Boys! (1966). She continued to play roles in Disney into the 1970s. She did television series work for a time, then in 1983 she reprised her most famous role in Psycho II, with her character vociferously protesting the proposed parole of Norman Bates (played, as in the original, by Anthony Perkins).