This resulted in her discovery in a London salon in 1897 by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who gave her the part of Faith Ives in the Henry Arthur Jones play The Dancing Girl.

[4][6] Crawley then returned as the sole female lead on Greet's third tour of the States in 1904, with a young Sybil Thorndike as her understudy.

[4][9] She spent several months recuperating in the resort town of Sierra Madre, California after contracting tuberculosis during a 1912 tour of Canada,[10] and then settled in Los Angeles from 1913 on to focus her career on silent films.

[11] Crawley became closely associated with Arthur Maude, a British actor and director ten years her junior, who in 1906 had become the manager of her stage company.

Crawley played the role of Calpurnia opposite Tyrone Power Sr. as Marcus Brutus and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. as Cato.

[24] She died on 17 March 1919 in Los Angeles,[25] and her estranged husband John Sawyer Crawley handled the final affairs of her estate, even though Arthur Maude had been her companion for the previous six years.

She kept one or more monkeys as pets during most of her adult life, and her adventures smuggling them into train stations and hotel rooms in hat boxes made for popular reading in the newspapers.