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Born in Bristol, England in 1949, Veronica moved to Los Angeles with her family as a young girl where she was bitten by the acting bug. At the age of 14 she starred in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 horror The Birds, and went on to work alongside Henry Fonda and starred in NBC's Daniel Boone from 1964 until 1966. In 1978 she starred alongside Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldblum, and Leonard Nimoy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a now cult horror movie about a San Francisco health inspector and his colleague who, over the course of a few days, discover that humans are being replaced by alien duplicates, each a perfect biological clone of the person replaced yet devoid of empathy and humanity. It was in 1979 that she broke out though as Lambert in director Ridley Scott's Alien. Famously, her reaction to the chestburster scene, where an alien explodes from the chest of one of Lambert's colleagues, is real as Veronica was not told beforehand what would occur. "I saw it in the theater when it first came out, and people got up and left the theater when the chestburster came out. They were just totally freaked. It was a good scare, and it holds up, which is amazing." she told PopHorror.com in 2025. "That whole movie was shot with no CGI. Everything was practical. You just don’t make movies like that anymore"
