[6] Following her appearance in a revival of The Cradle Will Rock in 1947, Vance decided to move to California to pursue other theatre projects and opportunities in film.

During her stay in Los Angeles, Vance appeared in two films: as streetwise chambermaid Leah in The Secret Fury (1950), and as Alicia in The Blue Veil (1951).

Following her departure from The Lucy Show at the end of the third season, Vance signed on to appear in a Blake Edwards film, The Great Race (1965); she saw this as an opportunity to restart a movie career, which never really took off.

CBS refused Pepper on the grounds she had a serious drinking problem,[9] and Benaderet was already playing Blanche Morton on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.

Vance's Ethel Mertz character was the landlady of a New York City apartment that she and her husband Fred owned on East 68th Street.

According to some reports, things first went sour when Frawley overheard Vance complaining about his age, stating that he should be playing her father instead of her husband.

[13] In 1957, after the highly successful half-hour I Love Lucy episodes ended, Vance continued playing Ethel Mertz on a series of hour-long specials titled The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show (later retitled The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour).

[14] Instead, Vance was interested in doing a series based on the life of Babs Hooten, a New York socialite who moves to New Mexico to run a hotel and ranch.

Arnaz later retooled the show with model and actress Joanne Dru taking the lead role, selling the series to ABC, where it was subsequently cancelled after one season.

Vance reluctantly agreed to be her co-star on the condition she be allowed to appear in more glamorous clothes and have her character be named "Vivian".

After her death, Desi Arnaz said, "It’s bad enough to lose one of the great artists we had the honor and the pleasure to work with, but it’s even harder to reconcile the loss of one of your best friends.

In a 1986 interview, Lucille Ball talked about watching I Love Lucy reruns and her feelings about Vance's performance: "I find that now I usually spend my time looking at Viv.

On January 20, 2010, the San Francisco Chronicle reported a local antique dealer had inherited many of Vance's photos and scrapbooks and a manuscript of her unpublished autobiography when John Dodds died in 1986.

[24] The story of how Vance was hired to play Ethel Mertz is told in I Love Lucy: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Sitcom, a stage comedy which premiered in Los Angeles on July 12, 2018.