Raised primarily in Victoria, Australia, he worked as a photographer, playwright and theatre manager there and in New Zealand prior to his career in film.

Early in his career, he was known by the name S. F. Travers Vale under which name he authored his first known play, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1888) which is an adaptation of the 1886 novel of the same name by Fergus Hume.

By 1898 the family had moved to the United States with Vale's first original play written in that country being After the War (premiered October 7, 1898, Athens, Georgia).

In 1901 he established the Travers Vale Stock Company which performed his original plays and with whom he also starred in productions of his own works.

Several of his films made prior to his move to California featured his second wife, the actress Louise Vale, who died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.

[1] The son of Joseph Flohm and Esther Flegeltaub, his parents were Russian Polish Jews who had settled in Britain during the Crimean War.

[citation needed] Travers Vale [Solomon Flohm] married his first cousin, Leah Flegeltaub [daughter of Esther's brother Aaron] on 24 July 1893 in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia.

[2] While Travers Vale had purchased the sole right to adapt the novel for the theatre in all of Australia, several pirated versions of the novel were already appearing on the Australian stage by other writers.

[19] The Travers Vale Stock Company remained actively performing in theaters in a variety of cities in the United States into the second decade of the 20th century.

As late as October 1911 the company was engaged at the Gayety Theatre in Hoboken, New Jersey performing a production of Alexandre Bisson's Madame X.

[22][23] That same year he adapted Dion Boucicault's 1857 play The Streets of New York into a film for Pilot,[24] and made the Western The Abandoned Well.

[21] In 1914 he made the first film adaptation of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewitt for the Biograph Company; a work which is extant within the archives of the George Eastman Museum.

[27] After this, Vale moved with his family to California to join the roster of directors at Rayart Pictures where he made the film The Street of Tears (1924).