[2] Fellows appeared in a series of leading roles for Columbia, including Tugboat Princess (1936), Little Miss Roughneck (1938), and The Little Adventuress (1938).

[3] Her performance as the precocious orphan alongside Bing Crosby in Pennies from Heaven (1936) won her critical acclaim.

In 1942, she appeared in two Gene Autry films, Heart of the Rio Grande and Stardust on the Sage, which highlighted her fine singing voice.

[1][3] Additional screen roles soon followed, including Daddy Long Legs (1931), The Rider of Death Valley (1932), two Our Gang comedies, Shivering Shakespeare (1930) and Mush and Milk (1933), and Jane Eyre (1934) for Monogram Pictures, in which she played Mr. Rochester's ward, a precocious matchmaker trying to bring together her guardian and Jane.

[2] In 1935, Fellows appeared in Gregory La Cava's She Married Her Boss (1935) as Melvyn Douglas's deceitful daughter who is tamed when Claudette Colbert "spanks the daylight out of her" with a hairbrush.

[1] With her first Columbia films,One-Way Ticket, And So They Were Married, and Tugboat Princess, she continued to be typecast as the orphan or street urchin.

Hers really is an exceptional performance for a youngster, skirting the perils of bathos in her tender scenes and playing her rebellious ones with comic impertinence.

Edith’s mother made outrageous claims, saying that the girl was abducted by her grandmother—a charge taken seriously in the wake of the Lindbergh kidnapping four years earlier—and that her father once tried to sell her to a dancing school.

[3] She wrote the story for what became her last Columbia picture, Her First Beau, and included a sidekick role for her offscreen friend Millie Lou.

Two of the films were Gene Autry westerns (Heart of the Rio Grande and Stardust on the Sage), which showcased her fine singing voice.

[5][citation needed] She also appeared in Uncle Willie, a stage comedy starring Menasha Skulnik that ran for several months in 1956 and 1957.

[1] The diagnosis marked the beginning of a downward spiral into dependence, interrupted briefly by a second failed marriage that ended when her husband tried to persuade her to return to acting.

[2][3] Penniless, Fellows took a series of jobs as an operator for telephone answering services while sinking deeper into alcoholism and depression.