Born in New York City, Beaudine began his career as an actor in 1909, aged 17, with American Mutoscope and Biograph Company.

In 1926 he made Sparrows, the story of orphans imprisoned in a swamp farm starring Mary Pickford, and The Canadian, based upon a W. Somerset Maugham play and shot on location in Alberta with Thomas Meighan as the lead.

Beaudine was one of a number of experienced directors (including Raoul Walsh and Allan Dwan) who were brought to England from Hollywood in the 1930s to work on what were in all other respects very British productions.

Beaudine had lost much of his personal fortune through no fault of his own (a bank he bought an interest in had failed, and much of his income was claimed by the British government in taxes).

He hired Beaudine to direct Misbehaving Husbands (1940), noteworthy at the time as the comeback feature of silent-screen clown Harry Langdon.

William Beaudine became a low-budget specialist, forsaking his artistic ambitions in favor of strictly commercial film fare, and recouping his financial losses through sheer volume of work.

He made dozens of comedies, thrillers and melodramas with such popular personalities as Bela Lugosi, Ralph Byrd, Edmund Lowe, Jean Parker, and The East Side Kids.

He became a fixture at the ambitious Monogram Pictures and directed fully half of the 48 comedy features starring The Bowery Boys.

His last two feature films, both released in 1966, were the horror-westerns Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (with John Carradine) and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter.

His final screen credit was posthumous: The Green Hornet was compiled from the TV series and released as a feature film in 1974.

In 1980, in their tongue-in-cheek book The Golden Turkey Awards, Michael and Harry Medved included William Beaudine in their list of worst directors of all time.

[7] They gave him the unflattering nickname "One-Shot," because he always seemed to shoot just one take, regardless of actors flubbing their lines or special effects malfunctioning.