She is best known for having portrayed Luna, the daughter of Bela Lugosi's character, Count Mora, in Mark of the Vampire, and for creating the iconic look of the female vampire with her waist-length dark hair and Adrian-designed shroud in this film.

[1] Borland was a drama student at the University of California, Berkeley at the time she took the role of Luna in Mark of the Vampire (1935).

[4] Borland got the attention of Lugosi—and a part in the play—by writing to him and suggesting that Dracula did not die at the end of the novel, but rather turned to dust just as the sun was setting.

[5] Borland retired from acting in 1953, though her other screen appearances were limited to a short film in 1933 and an unbilled appearance in the 1936 serial Flash Gordon, until Fred Olen Ray cast her in his films Scalps (1983) and Biohazard (1985).

Borland, suffering from diabetes and other health issues in her later life, relocated from her home in the Napa Valley to Arlington, Virginia, to be closer to her daughter.