As movie buffs know, Veronica Rondo got her first taste of public notoriety with her relatively small but memorable turn in 1924's Cunning Little Bastards, with Conrad Nagel and Adolphe Menjou, one of a handful of silents she made. The following year saw her in the acclaimed silent melodrama The Golden Opportunity and her first starring role in The Muffled Cries of Josephina. Veronica thrived once talkies took over, with her smoky coltralto and ability to color the most innocent throwaway lines with a tone of sly sultriness. MGM shaped her career to highlight these smoldering qualities (at least until the Hays Code of 1930) in such films as the debutante-rivalry musical Balls Balls Balls! and the cheerfully amoral Three Impossible People, with Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery. Throughout the thirties she had starring roles in a number of high profile projects, including stunning femme fatale performances in the lurid crime dramas The Deformed Guardrail and Crossed Off, both directed by Raoul Walsh. She also teamed with Cat People and Out of the Past director Jacques Tourneur for the spellbindingly weird noirish horror phantasmagoria Searching the Reeds by Flashlight, a stylish and claustrophobic film which later became a critical favorite of the Nouvelle Vague aesthetic. By this time her career was waning, however, and she consented to star opposite William Powell in the light-hearted caper film Aubrey In Cahoots, about a man who trains his cat to burglarize the homes of rich society women. Both actors felt upstaged by the cat (played by two different black cats, Faro and Whist) and only agreed to reprise their roles in two sequels with great reluctance, lured by the promise of an easy paycheck. Aubrey In Fine Fettle and Aubrey In Flagrante Delicto were enormous hits, and although they allowed Veronica to maintain the lifestyle to which she'd become accustomed they did nothing to further her career and few substantive roles came her way as the forties rolled around. During the war years she was prone to increasingly eccentric behavior and spectacular displays of public drunkenness, and once spit champagne in the face of Francois Truffaut, who had approached her in a Paris restaurant to express his admiration. Her final film performance was a grotesque self-parody in Nicholas Ray's sleazy The Evisceration of Emily, in which she plays a bloated, incoherent crone whose floozy daughter holds her prisoner in a lonely attic and is therefore helpless to intervene when the daughter is brutally murdered by a sexually-confused jockey, inexplicably played by the short but hardly jockeyesque Sal Mineo. Veronica Rondo died soon after, in April 1962, and is interred at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, section D, not very far at all from Natalie Wood.