Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on October 17, 1909, Walton began his acting career in the theatres of Chicago and New York City.

Tall, blond and elegant, Walton played many aristocratic, intellectual or sophisticated English or European men in films such as The Count of Monte Cristo in 1934; Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in which Walton memorably played the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the film's prologue; the Clark Gable version of Mutiny on the Bounty (1935); and director John Ford's Mary of Scotland (1936) starring Katharine Hepburn, in which Walton gave his perhaps best performance as the effeminate and cowardly "Lord Darnley".

[1][2] Ford directed Walton in The Lost Patrol (1934) and The Long Voyage Home (1940, starring John Wayne) as well.

Walton also acted in Bad Lands, the 1939 Western remake of Ford's The Lost Patrol, directed by Lew Landers.

[3] In the 1940s, Walton's parts were secondary characters or even uncredited roles in B-movies, or sometimes in high-profile films such as King Vidor's Northwest Passage (1940), starring Spencer Tracy, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945).