[1] That same year, Spooner made her motion picture debut in the Edison Studios adaptation of Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper.

She was praised by a reviewer for Moving Picture World for her ability to convey the distinctions between the two characters.

The police and the local community had taken offense to the play Spooner had opened the night before, The House of Bondage, and its treatment of "white slavery," a euphemistic term for sex trafficking.

Spooner was released into the custody of her lawyer; she revised the play twice to remove the "objectionable" content, but the show ran for only eight performances and was reviewed negatively by theater critics.

[citation needed] Cecil Spooner died on May 13, 1953, in Sherman Oaks, California.