Hoctor's maternal aunt, Annie Kearney, was a social secretary to a wealthy woman in Hoosick Falls who took an interest in young Harriet.

At the age of twelve she was sent to New York City and placed under the tutelage of Russian ballet master Louis Harvy Chalif of the Normal School of Dancing.

Hoctor appeared in a doll ballet and was informed that Florenz Ziegfeld was offering her a trial part in his production of The Three Musketeers (1928).

[3] Upon her return to the United States, she appeared in the Vanities revue of Earl Carroll in 1932, and later in the decade in the Ziegfeld Follies, notably in a ballet arranged by Hoctor with the aid of George Balanchine titled "Night Flight" about the ghost of a young aviator: "A young girl, flying cross-country in pursuance of a non-stop record, crashes and is killed.

Two years later, in 1937, The New York Times announced Hoctor as the lead in the planned Astaire movie A Damsel in Distress, but Joan Fontaine eventually claimed the part.

She was buried in St. Mary's Cemetery in her native Hoosick Falls following a Mass of Christian Burial at the Church of the Immaculate Conception.