On television, she portrayed Aunt Iola on All in the Family, Adelaide Brubaker on Diff'rent Strokes, Emma Tisdale on The Dukes of Hazzard, and Winona Beck on Filthy Rich.

Her film roles include Big Ed in Lust in the Dust (1985), Loretta Houk in Moving Violations (1985), and Lana in Earth Girls Are Easy (1988).

Volz often played grandmothers or feisty little old ladies in 1970s sitcoms such as Alice, Maude and One Day at a Time, and she appeared in two of Norman Lear's summer television series: as Grandma Belle Durbin in A Year at the Top in 1977[6]: 1201  and as Bill Macy's housekeeper Pinky Nolan in Hanging In in 1979.

[6]: 428  In 1978, Volz appeared in the pilot episode of the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati, where she whacked a turntable with her umbrella in protest of the station's format change, and in All In The Family as Edith's spinster relative and unwelcome visitor, Aunt Iola.

In Moving Violations, director Neil Israel allowed her to do many stunts herself, including being lifted into a window and falling head-first onto the floor.