A granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright, Baxter studied acting with Maria Ouspenskaya and had some stage experience before making her film debut in 20 Mule Team (1940).

She became a contract player of 20th Century Fox and was loaned to RKO Pictures for the role of Lucy Morgan in Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), one of her earlier films.

She worked with several of Hollywood's greatest directors, including Billy Wilder in Five Graves to Cairo (1943), Alfred Hitchcock in I Confess (1953), Fritz Lang in The Blue Gardenia (1953), and Cecil B. DeMille in The Ten Commandments (1956), for which she won a Laurel Award for Topliner Female Dramatic Performance.

[2] At age 10, Baxter attended a Broadway play starring Helen Hayes where she was so impressed she declared to her family she wanted to become an actress.

Director Alfred Hitchcock deemed Baxter too young for the role, but the screen test brought her offers from MGM and 20th Century Fox.

"[8] She was loaned to United Artists for the leading role in the film noir Guest in the House (1944), and appeared in A Royal Scandal (1945), with Tallulah Bankhead and Charles Coburn; Smoky (1946), with Fred MacMurray; and Angel on My Shoulder (1946), with Paul Muni and Claude Rains.

Baxter later recounted that The Razor's Edge contained her only great performance, a hospital scene where the character Sophie "loses her husband, child and everything else."

Back at 20th Century Fox, she played a wide variety of roles: a lawyer in love with Cornel Wilde in The Walls of Jericho (1948); Tyrone Power's Irish romantic interest in The Luck of the Irish (1948); a tomboy in Yellow Sky (1948), with Gregory Peck and Richard Widmark; a 1920s flapper in You're My Everything (1949), with Dan Dailey; and another tomboy in A Ticket to Tomahawk (1950), again with Dailey.

In 1950, Baxter was chosen to co-star in All About Eve largely because of a resemblance to Claudette Colbert, who originally was cast but dropped out and was replaced by Bette Davis.

Her final acting assignments at Fox were My Wife's Best Friend, with MacDonald Carey, and a segment in O. Henry's Full House (1952),[11] which featured an ensemble cast.

Her first was opposite Montgomery Clift in Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess; the second was the Fritz Lang whodunit The Blue Gardenia, in which she played a woman accused of murder.

[12] At Universal-International, she made two films set in the Old West: One Desire (1955), with Rock Hudson and Julie Adams, and The Spoilers (1955), with Jeff Chandler and Rory Calhoun.

[13] Baxter was directed by her publicist and boyfriend, Russell Birdwell, in the independent film noir The Come On (1956),[12] co-starring Sterling Hayden as her leading man.

Baxter won the part of the Egyptian princess and queen Nefertari (spelled Nefretiri in the film) in Cecil B. DeMille's award-winning biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956).

Despite criticisms of her interpretation of Nefertari, DeMille and The Hollywood Reporter both thought her performance was "very good",[16][17] and The New York Daily News described her as "remarkably effective".

In the British mystery film Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958),[12] she shared star billing with Richard Todd and Herbert Lom.

Baxter made a guest appearance on My Three Sons season 8 episode 10, aired on November 4, 1967, called "Designing Woman", portraying a glamorous female engineer who wanted Steve Douglas (Fred MacMurray) as a love interest and possible future husband.

[citation needed] Baxter returned to Broadway during the 1970s in Applause, the musical version of All About Eve, but this time as Margo Channing (succeeding Lauren Bacall).

[27] In 1960, Baxter married a second time to Randolph Galt, an American owner of a cattle station at Gloucester near Sydney where she was filming Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

After the birth of their second daughter, Maginel, back in California, Galt unexpectedly announced that they were moving to a 4,452 hectares (11,000 acres) ranch south of Grants, New Mexico.

[36] She remained on life support for eight days in New York's Lenox Hill Hospital, until family members agreed that brain function had ceased, and she died on December 12, at the age of 62.