Her mother and she went to Nome, Alaska, where young Marjorie dressed as a boy, sang, and played the banjo in saloons and music halls.

Her mother insisted she dress as a boy to thwart amorous attention from drunken grown men in such a wild and woolly outpost as Nome.

/ And were collected in a crystal sea, / The envious ocean would curl up and dry— / So awful in its mightiness, that lake, / So fathomless, that clear and salty deep.

By the time talkies came along, she was in her early 40s and began to take on character roles in films such as Min and Bill (1930), The Secret Six (1931) starring Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, Laughing Sinners (1931) with Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, Grand Canary (1934) with Warner Baxter and Madge Evans, Palooka (1934) with Jimmy Durante, and Primrose Path (1940) with Ginger Rogers and Joel McCrea, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Also in 1940, she had second billing under Wallace Beery (the co-star of the original Tugboat Annie) in 20 Mule Team; she also played an Italian mother in East of the River with John Garfield and Brenda Marshall.

Her other films included second billing in Tobacco Road (1941) and Broadway (1942) starring George Raft and Pat O'Brien.

According to author and theatre critic Bernard Sobel, the sandwich was invented for her upon a visit to Reuben's Restaurant and Delicatessen in New York City.

[11] Rambeau died in 1970 at her home in Palm Springs, California, and was buried at the Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City.