Spotted after singing on a local TV show, Fraser was encouraged to take drama lessons and eventually gained experience in stage plays.
On television, she appeared opposite Tyler MacDuff in the Western series, Annie Oakley, in the episode "The Saga of Clement O'Toole".
Fraser played the older daughter but (as with all others in the family except Robert Young) was not cast as part of the regular series.
She played a wife possessed by aliens in the Roger Corman film It Conquered the World (1956), the sister of the titular monster in War of the Colossal Beast (1958), and a mother protecting her baby in Earth vs. the Spider (1958).
She was briefly onscreen as the United Nations receptionist who introduces Cary Grant's character to Philip Ober's Lester Townsend in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and also appeared in Giant from the Unknown (1958).