[3][4] After performing in bit parts in Oakland theaters,[3] Williams began professional acting in earnest in 1901 with the Baldwin-Melville Stock Company in New Orleans.

Vitagraph wrecked a real train in this action melodrama, which co-starred Williams with his most frequent leading lady, Anita Stewart.

They were also teamed in the studio's earliest entry in the then-popular serial genre, The Goddess in 1915, and Williams made a dashing gentleman thief in Vitagraph's 1917 version of the ever popular Arsene Lupin.

[5] Her previous arrests for dispersing bad checks and other financial and personal setbacks finally prompted the 33-year-old widow, who was on probation at the time in San Francisco, and her 80-year-old mother to commit suicide together by inhaling excessive amounts of chloroform.

[5] Before their own deaths, the women used the same method of saturating rolls of cotton with chloroform to sedate and murder Florine's six-year-old daughter and three-year-old son.