The daughter of actress Ada Loftus[1] and actor Dallas Welford, she was born in London, England and came to the United States when she was six years old.

[4] In 1922 she appeared at the Fulton Theatre on Broadway in the musical Orange Blossoms by Victor Herbert.

In 1923, a caption of a photograph in the New York Daily News described her as the prima donna of a musical comedy and noted, "She has come up from the chorus and come to stay.

On October 24, 1924, Welford married film director F. Heath Cobb in Cleveland, Ohio.

Her parents learned of the marriage about a month later, prompting her father to say, "I don't believe it", and putting her mother under a doctor's care at her home.