Kane's first known Broadway performance, the idle inventor, Daniel Murray, in Rutherford Mayne's comedy, The Drone, came in 1912, the year he immigrated to America.

He played the First Gravedigger in 23 productions of Hamlet, supporting such actors as John Barrymore, Maurice Evans, Walter Hampden and Godfrey Tearle.

[6] His career extended into the early years of television where the "round little man with a plum for a nose, a plump chin and ruddy full-blown cheeks" was one Christmas Eve called upon to play Santa Claus.

Kane was a member of the cast that appeared in the very early NBC 1939 Teleplay, The Streets of New York and the 1954 Hallmark Hall of Fame production of King Richard II that was adapted for television by Maurice Evans.

[7] Kane's final Broadway performance came early in 1956 as Samuel in Seán O'Casey's drama, Roses for You, before closing out his career that summer at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut.

By then, Kane was struggling with cancer, but refused to cut back on his commitments in order to preserve his record of only missing one performance in over fifty years of theatre work.