Baxter began his movie career in silent films with his most notable roles being in The Great Gatsby (1926) and The Awful Truth (1925).

After selling farm implements for a living, Baxter worked for four months as the partner of Dorothy Shoemaker in an act on the Keith Vaudeville Circuit.

His most notable silent roles were in The Great Gatsby (1926), Aloma of the South Seas (1926) as an island love interest opposite dancer Gilda Gray, and as an alcoholic doctor in West of Zanzibar (1928) with Lon Chaney.

He is the chap the lonely woman on the prairie sees when she looks at the men's ready-to-wear pages in the latest mail order catalogue"; this appraisal by Jim Tully appeared in Picturegoer in 1936.

Baxter was certainly the inspiration for artwork in mail-order catalogues and adverts for pipes, the prototype for men modelling cardigans or pullovers or tweeds.

[12]Baxter's most notable starring role was as The Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona (1929), the first all-talking Western, for which he won the second Academy Award for Best Actor.

[16] By 1936, Baxter was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, but by 1943, he had slipped to B movie roles, and he starred in a series of Crime Doctor films for Columbia Pictures.

[17] In 1936, Baxter had what Leonard Maltin considered his finest job of acting in John Ford's The Prisoner of Shark Island.

The studio system and being a top leading man with Fox made him wealthy beyond his dreams but it also let him in for some significant personal problems.

They relied on the formula of having their major stars repeat the same type of stories and characters when it reverberated with an audience.

He said working with Loretta Young was fine as she had been around since the silent days and fans did not view her as a youngster, but the new crop such as Lynn Bari and Arleen Whelan made him feel very uncomfortable.

[22] As his 20th Century Fox contract was nearing completion, he was openly talking of retiring, a decision he was making with his wife Winifred Bryson.

On August 5, 1931, Baxter survived uninjured with 40 other cast and crew members the train derailment of the Southern Pacific Argonaut east of Yuma on route to Tucson for location shooting for The Cisco Kid.

[35][36] During the war, Baxter was chairman of the Malibu Rationing Board and also did some troop entertaining in Army camps in the Fresno and Bakersfield areas.

[37] Baxter was a close friend of William Powell, with whom he had starred in three silent films, the best of which was The Great Gatsby now considered lost.

[38] Juliet Colman's biography of her father describes in detail the very private social circle of cocktails, dinner and games of tennis or poker held between her father's Hollywood house at 2092 Mound Street above and behind the Castle Argyle, and Baxter's home on South Beachwood Drive.

When not acting, Baxter was an inventor who co-created a searchlight for revolvers in 1935, which allowed a shooter to more clearly see a target at night.

He also developed a radio device that allowed emergency crews to change traffic signals from two blocks away, providing them with safe passage through intersections.

[17] Baxter suffered from arthritis for several years, as well as a chronic illness which caused eating difficulties and induced malnutrition.

[40][41] On May 7, 1951, he died of pneumonia at age 62[5] and was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California in a private funeral service described as markedly reminiscent of the film capital's earlier days.

[43] Winifred married St. Louis architect Ferdinand Herman Menger at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 15, 1953.