Due to her good grades, she was hired as a sales clerk in Halmstad on the Swedish west coast, unusual for a young woman from a worker's family at the time, but she had set her mind on going to the United States.

[citation needed] The noted cover artist, Penrhyn Stanlaws, chose her as one of his models which led to her feature role in the Kalem Motion Picture Company's 1911 film Molly Pitcher.

She stayed at the Kalem studio for several years, ranked behind its top star Alice Joyce, before branching out to other production companies.

Films of special note are Regeneration (1915) Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917), Soldiers of Fortune (1919), The Toll Gate and The Luck of the Irish (both 1920), and The Lotus Eater (1921).

In 1923, she was severely burned while filming a scene in which she drove a locomotive through a forest fire for Hearts Aflame;[5] she required a week to recuperate, but that did not impede her career.

In 1928, she set a record for fan mail, some 30,000 letters per month, and in that year Joseph P. Kennedy brought her to his newly formed film company RKO Radio Pictures.