The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Cassidy,[1] Catherine Calvert was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland.

[2] She made her stage debut in the play Brown of Harvard in September 1908, in Albany, New York.

[2] On Broadway, she portrayed Doris Moore in The Deep Purple (1911),[3][4] May Joyce in The Escape (1913), and Dona Sol in Blood and Sand (1921).

[5] After many years' experience onstage in productions including The Deep Purple (a play by her future husband, Paul Armstrong), in 1910, she entered films via Keeney Pictures Corporation in A Romance of the Underworld (1918; based on a play in which she had appeared onstage).

[1] She later married Canadian grain exporter George A. Carruthers, who died in 1952.