[3] She began dancing at the Chez Paree nightclub in Chicago at age 15, which paid for ballet lessons,[2] and was a dancer in the 1949 Broadway production of Miss Liberty.

[8] She was troubled by the attitude toward women's beauty at the studios in the early 1950s: "Because I was afraid of being robbed of my individuality, I fought with the makeup people, the hairdressers, and I didn't understand problems of the publicity department," she was reported as saying in 1957.

[9] Among her other Broadway shows were The Flowering Peach, The Happiest Girl in the World, and Michael V. Gazzo's Night Circus, a 1958 production which lasted for only a week,[10] but introduced Rule to Ben Gazzara, who became her third husband.

[8] Her other films in the 1950s included A Woman's Devotion (1956), the Western Gun for a Coward (1957) and Bell, Book and Candle (1958), in which she played the fiancée who loses publisher 'Shep' Henderson (James Stewart) to the spell-casting witch Gillian Holroyd (Kim Novak).

Among her later film roles were Emily Stewart in The Chase (1966), Sheila Sommers in The Ambushers (1967), Burt Lancaster's bitter ex-lover in The Swimmer (1968), Willie in Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977), journalist Kate Newman in Costa Gavras' political thriller Missing (1982), and Kevin Costner's mother in American Flyers (1985).

She began her formal studies in 1973, specialising in treating her fellow actors,[2] and received her PhD 10 years later from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in Los Angeles.