Her father managed a theatre, and she became a child actress who went on to work in vaudeville.

She appeared in an early color feature film Cupid Angling (1918) made in the Natural Color process invented by Leon F. Douglass, and filmed in the Lake Lagunitas area of Marin County, California.

[citation needed] Roland worked the film business until 1930 when she made her first talkie.

Although her voice worked well enough on screen, now entering her forties she returned to performing in live theatre, making only one more film appearance in 1936.

Ruth Roland died of cancer in 1937, aged 45, in Hollywood and is interred near her husband in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.