[3] Marshall began acting on the stage at 18, appearing in Saratoga at the Winter Garden in San Francisco on March 8, 1883.

[4] For several years, Marshall played with a variety of stock theater troupes, including both acting and being stage manager for E. H. Sothern's company.

[2] By the time D. W. Griffith cast him as the High Priest of Bel in Intolerance (1916), he had already appeared in a number of silent films.

He played a vast array of drunken trail scouts, lovable grandpas, unforgiving fathers, sinister attorneys and lecherous aristocrats.

In one of Marshall's last films, This Gun for Hire (1942) starring Alan Ladd, he played a treacherously sinister nitrogen industrialist.