[3] Florence La Badie moved to New York after school and became one of the most important and popular actresses of the early motion picture era.

She was a frequent subject for articles and letters in fan and trade magazines, and over a period of years, she was the most publicized and beloved of all Thanhouser players.

Given an impromptu bit part, La Badie was invited back to Biograph's studios to participate in another film later that year.

With her sophistication and beauty, Florence La Badie soon became Thanhouser's most prominent actress, appearing in dozens of films over the next two years.

In 1915, she was featured in the magazine Reel Life, which described her as "the beautiful and talented Florence La Badie, of the Thanhouser Studios, considered one of the foremost of American screen players".

She had many movie fans in Canada and, according to one New York newspaper, in 1915 a young soldier fighting in the trenches at the Front in Northern France wrote to her, sending dozens of photographs that graphically depicted the horrors of the war.

Deeply affected, La Badie became a vigorous advocate for peace, traveling the United States with a stereopticon slide show of the soldier's photographs, warning about the terrible dangers of going to war.

Although the Thanhouser Corporation had been struggling since the 1914 death of Charles J. Hite in an automobile accident, La Badie's career was thriving and had been their saving grace.

On August 28, 1917, while driving near Ossining, New York, in the company of her fiancé, Daniel Carson Goodman, La Badie found her brakes failed and the vehicle plunged down a hill, overturning at the bottom.

La Badie was the first major female film star to die while her career was at its peak, and the movie-going public mourned her death.