[1] Kavanaugh was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1874, and she attended school at Mount de Sales and Notre Dame.
Soon she was a star of the local Baltimore theater scene, frequently writing and acting in her own plays and collaborating with the Ziegfeld players.
[9] In 1918, Kavanaugh won second place in Photoplay's scenario-writing contest for Betty Takes a Hand [fr], which would eventually be produced.
Eventually she became homesick for the stage, and she took a sabbatical to return to Baltimore, where she opened the Katharine Kavanaugh School, which taught acting and screenwriting.
While her screenwriting career cooled in the late 1930s, she continued writing plays that were produced in the Los Angeles area until her death in 1942.