[6] The Los Angeles Times drama critic called her performance as a troubled teenager "wonderful"[6] though a later article indicates her stage debut was as an unpaid apprentice.
[4] Still a senior in high school, O'Donnell signed with the Jeanne Halliburton talent agency, which advertised her for ingenue parts in casting directories.
The director of this short, William F. Claxton, would also direct O'Donnell's first feature length film Young Jesse James, shot in 1959 but not released until August 1960.
She had only one television performance, on Zane Grey Theatre,[13] and when Young Jesse James was released in August the New York Times reviewer described her as "drab".
[15] The show, called Westinghouse Playhouse, was not an anthology series as the name might suggest, but a sitcom loosely based on events in the real family life of star Nanette Fabray.
[15] O'Donnell was cast as Fabray's new seventeen year old step-daughter, who initially resents her father's (Wendell Corey) re-marriage.
She had two films, a light comedy Saintly Sinners,[22] and Incident in an Alley,[23] a noir drama based on a Rod Serling story.
The following year (1963) saw her starting to break out of teenage typecasting, as she played more mature roles on four narrative dramas: Perry Mason,[24] Arrest and Trial, and two episodes of Ben Casey.
[32] However, she did only one dramatic television series in 1967, and by 1970 finished out her performing career with a minor part in a mixed genre film, Hell's Bloody Devils.
[36] An apocryphal rumor was circulated by newspaper columnist Walter Winchell that she had spent the money earned from the commercials on a Ford automobile.
[2] O'Donnell gave an interview in 1967 to beauty columnist Lydia Lane in which she mentioned having attended college where she experienced a broken romance.