As Margaret Gibson, she starred in 1910s Vitagraph westerns. She came to lead a rather tumultuous private life, punctuated by several arrests for "'vagrancy"--a popular euphemism of the period for prostitution--and extortion, which necessitated her change of name to Patricia Palmer. Her alleged deathbed confession to the 1922 murder of director
William Desmond Taylor has since been dismissed by the authorities.