The second of three sisters, she pursued acting as a child against her parents wishes and when she was 19 caught the attention of Olga Knipper (widow of Anton Chekov) who brought her to meet Constantin Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre.
Always dynamic on stage she went on a European tour with Moscow Art Theatre actress Vera Baranovskaya, where she met the Russian émigré medical student Eugene Tiscenko who was then living in Berlin.
Vera, who had changed her name to Begum Noor Jehan at her conversion on 27 June 1940, applied to the High Court of Calcutta on August 5, 1940, for a suit declaring dissolution of her marriage to Eugene Tiscenko.
Despite a subsequent appeal that left the case unresolved, she married Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy later in 1940 and they had one son, Rashid (aka Robert Ashby).
Her younger sister, Lydia, was living in a Manhattan apartment building at 130 West 57th Street that her husband, Dr. David Jedwabnik had inherited from his brother, Abram, in 1949.
On October 7, 1983, Vera was at Los Angeles International Airport about to board a flight to New York City to visit her sister, Lydia, en route to give a lecture at the Moscow Art Theatre when she suffered a sudden stroke as she was arguing with the baggage handler about the treatment of her luggage.