She made her big screen debut in the 1967 drama film Banning and the following year played the female lead in the crime thriller Coogan's Bluff.

She later starred in films Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1971), Valdez Is Coming (1971), Skin Game (1971), Showdown (1973), The Midnight Man (1974), Airport 1975 (1975), Night Moves (1975), The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975), Murder by Decree (1979), Promises in the Dark (1979) and Porky's (1981).

[2] From 1983 to 1989, she starred as Katherine Papadopolis in the American sitcom Webster, on which she appeared with her husband, Alex Karras, receiving Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy nomination in 1985.

[6] In 1976, she starred in a three-hour made-for-television movie biography of the aviator Amelia Earhart which also covered her marriage to noted publisher G. P. Putnam; she received an Emmy nomination for Best Actress.

She posed topless for Playboy in the February 1973 issue pictorial entitled "The Ziegfeld Girls: A dazzling review starring the talking pictures' own Susan Clark".