When Celia was four, she acted in The Yiddish King Lear alongside her father and step-mother, in a role playwright Jacob Gordin had written specifically for her.

[5] Adler's first major dramatic success was in Ossip Dymou's “The Eternal Wanderer,” at Boris Thomashefsky's National Theater in New York in 1913.

The next year, she re-encountered her childhood acquaintance theater manager and actor Jack Cone, who suggested he marry her so he could join her on her journey to perform in Buenos Aires and appease her fear of traveling alone.

[5] During her career, Adler created leading roles in Yiddish versions of many classic plays, including the work of Hauptmann, Sudermann, Ibsen, Shaw and Shakespeare.

[6] As Yiddish-language theater became less popular with the dispersal of the Jewish community and decrease in Yiddish-speakers, Adler made her loyalty to the genre clear; when she acted in an English version of David Pinski's The Treasure, she wrote a letter in the Yiddish World assuring her fans that this was temporary.

[5] After World War II, Adler was contracted by the Jewish Welfare Board to entertain troops in American military camps with an English and Yiddish program that she later brought off-Broadway.

[7] Adler, along with co-stars Paul Muni and Marlon Brando, refused to accept compensation above the Actor's Equity minimum wage because of her commitment to the cause of creating a Jewish State in Israel.

[9] Her last film was a 1985 British documentary with archive footage, Almonds and Raisins,[10] narrated by, among others, Orson Welles, Herschel Bernardi and Seymour Rechzeit.

[2] Adler is buried in the Yiddish Theatre Section of Mount Hebron Cemetery in New York City having died from a stroke.