In addition to her many stage roles, which included Queen Gertrude opposite John Barrymore's Hamlet, she was an occasional director and playwright.

Her most famous film role was Madame Defarge in MGM's version of A Tale of Two Cities (1935), but she was also the compassionate aunt in The Song of Bernadette (1943).

Her vocal talent attracted the admiration of composer and singer Harry Burleigh,[4] and she won a scholarship at age 15 to study voice and ballet at the Metropolitan Opera School (1903–05).

In his review of the premiere performance, New York Tribune music critic Henry Krehbiel singled out her contribution: "And while pointing out the beauty of the work of the principals, it is a pleasant privilege to lay a wreath at the feet of the little lady who carried the Grail with such reverent and touching consecration to her sacred duties.

"[4] She continued her studies at the Met Opera School but was dismissed when she injured her voice singing the role of Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore in an amateur production.

[6] In the year 1932 alone, she played the title role in Sophocles' Electra, was Helen of Troy in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, directed Carry Nation starring Esther Dale (a production that featured the Broadway debuts of Mildred Natwick and James Stewart) and appeared in Katharine Cornell's production of Lucrece by Deems Taylor and Thornton Wilder.

When she finally made her belated screen debut at the age of 47, it was in the role that many consider the greatest of her film career, the poisonously vindictive revolutionary Thérèse Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities.

In close-up, she flashed a look of steely malevolence; in her speech to the revolutionary tribunal – asking for the conviction and execution of Charles Darnay – she played it large and to the rafters.

[citation needed] She sought to play O-Lan in the 1937 film The Good Earth but lost out to Luise Rainer, who won an Academy Award for her performance.

[8] Her follow-up to A Tale of Two Cities was the lead in a B movie shoot-'em-up, Queen of the Mob (1940), in which Yurka played a gangster matriarch closely based on the contemporary outlaw, Ma Barker.

Notably, one of her co-stars in the latter film was Alla Nazimova (who had suggested Yurka's casting as Madame Defarge) playing the Marquessa Doña Maria.

[3] In December, 1945, she appeared at the Majestic Theatre for two readings of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex with classics scholar Eugene O'Neill, Jr.[10] Yurka was active in theater causes all her life.

She aligned herself with Tallulah Bankhead's defense of the Federal Theater Project at the 1939 Senate Appropriations Committee hearings that de-funded the program in reaction to productions that were deemed sympathetic to the political left-wing.

[3] Yurka collected her thoughts about acting technique in the book Dear Audience (1959) and wrote a memoir, Bohemian Girl (1970).

[citation needed][11][12] She suffered from failing health in her final years owing to arteriosclerosis and died June 6, 1974, at age 86.

She was interred in the same burial plot with her good friend, actress Florence Reed, in the Actors Fund of America section of Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.