She went on to receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Isabella Linton in the William Wyler directed romantic drama Wuthering Heights (1939).

Inspired by her aunt, actress Shelah Richards, Fitzgerald began her acting career in 1932 at Dublin's Gate Theatre.

After two seasons in Dublin, she moved to London,[7]: 12  where she found success in British films including The Mill on the Floss, Turn of the Tide, and Cafe Mascot.

Hollywood producer Hal B. Wallis saw her in this production and subsequently signed her to a contract with Warner Bros.[8] She had two significant successes in 1939: a role in the Bette Davis film Dark Victory,[9] and an Academy Award nomination for her supporting performance as Isabella Linton in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights.

[5] She then appeared in Shining Victory (1941), The Gay Sisters (1942), and Watch on the Rhine (1943) for Warner Bros., and Wilson (1944) for 20th Century Fox, but her career was hampered by her frequent clashes with studio management.

Although she continued to work throughout the 1940s, co-starring with John Garfield in the Warner Bros. crime drama Nobody Lives Forever (1946), the quality of her roles began to diminish and her career lost momentum.

[citation needed] In 1946, shortly after completing work on Three Strangers, she left Hollywood to return to New York City, where she married her second husband, Stuart Scheftel, a grandson of Isidor Straus.

In 1976, she performed as a cabaret singer with the show Streetsongs, which played three successful runs on Broadway and was the subject of a PBS television special.

[11] She also achieved success as a theatre director; in 1982, she became one of the first women to receive a Tony Award nomination for Best Direction of a Play for a production of Mass Appeal.

She won a Daytime Emmy Award as best actress for her appearance in the NBC Special Treat episode "Rodeo Red and the Runaways".