She is primarily known for her roles in television, particularly as attorney Beth Davenport on the NBC series The Rockford Files, but has also had a prolific career as a stage actress on Broadway as well as in regional theater.

Senator Henry W. Corbett, she spent her early life in Camp Sherman and Portland, where she graduated from the Catlin Gabel School.

Corbett studied drama at Carnegie Mellon University before making her stage debut in a production of Othello at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

She also starred off-Broadway in the title role of Iphigenia in Aulis (1968), and as Joan la Pucelle in Shakespeare's Henry VI, staged at Central Park's Delacorte Theater in 1970.

Between 1974 and 1978, she starred as the idealistic attorney Beth Davenport on the NBC series The Rockford Files, opposite James Garner.

Corbett subsequently starred in the horror film Jaws of Satan (1981), and the drama Million Dollar Infield (1982), directed by Hal Cooper.

[6] Corbett's father, tired of the city, relocated the family to rural Camp Sherman, Oregon,[11] where she spent her early life.

[5] Corbett attended the Catlin Gabel School in Portland, and as a teenager apprenticed with the Carnival Theatre camp at the University of Oregon.

[2] The same year, she appeared in stage productions of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, and Shakespeare's As You Like It (portraying Rosalind), held at Drew University in New Jersey.

[citation needed] During Christmas 1974, Corbett survived a house fire at her residence in Hollywood, California, which destroyed nearly all of her belongings and left her with minor injuries.

[28] Corbett appeared as Penny in another PBS televised play, George Kelly's The Fatal Weakness, opposite Eva Marie Saint and Dennis Dugan.

[31] In 1988, Corbett starred in the original workshop production of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles at the Seattle Repertory Theatre.

[32] Corbett reprised her role of Beth Davenport in the Rockford Files television films of the 1990s, including Friends and Foul Play, If the Frame Fits... (both 1996) and If It Bleeds...

[34] In late 2019, Corbett began filming the independent drama Pig, starring Nicolas Cage, Adam Arkin, and Alex Wolff.