After attending National Park Seminary in Washington, D.C., Lindsay convinced her parents to enroll her at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
She went abroad to England to make her stage debut.
She appeared in plays such as Escape, Death Takes a Holiday, and The Romantic Age.

She was often mistaken as being British due to her convincing English accent.
Her fellow dramatic-school student Robert Cummings was then posing as the Englishman "Blade Stanhope Conway" and convinced Margaret Kies to follow his example and adopt a new British identity: Margaret Lindsay.
 
She impressed Universal Studios enough to sign her for their 1932 version of The Old Dark House.
As James Robert Parish and William T. Leonard wrote in Hollywood Players: The Thirties (Arlington House, 1976), Lindsay returned to America and arrived in Hollywood, only to discover that Gloria Stuart had been cast in her role in the film.
After some minor roles in Pre-Code films such as Christopher Strong and the groundbreaking Baby Face, which starred Barbara Stanwyck, Lindsay was cast in the Fox Film Corporation's award-winning Cavalcade.
Lindsay was selected for a small but memorable role as Edith Harris, a doomed English bride whose honeymoon voyage takes place on the Titanic.

She won the role by backing up her British accent with an elaborate "biography" that claimed she was born in a London suburb, the daughter of a London broker who sent her to a London convent for her education. "
Although I looked and talked English... to tell them I was actually from Iowa would have lost the assignment for me," she later explained.

Her work in Cavalcade earned her a contract at Warner Bros. where she became a reliable supporting player, working with Paul Muni, Errol Flynn, Henry Fonda, Warren William, Leslie Howard, George Arliss, Humphrey Bogart, Boris Karloff and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.  Lindsay was cast four times as the love interest of James Cagney in Warner films from 1933 to 1935: Frisco Kid, Devil Dogs of the Air, G Men and Lady Killer.

 
Lindsay co-starred with Bette Davis in four Warners films: as Davis's sister in Fog Over Frisco (1934); in Dangerous (1935), for which Davis won her first Best Actress Academy Award; in Bordertown, co-starring Paul Muni, and, lastly, as Davis's rival for Henry Fonda's affections in Jezebel (1938), which earned Davis her second Best Actress Academy Award.

An example of her work in a leading role in lower budget films while at Warner Bros. was The Law in Her Hands (1936), a comedy in which she played a mob lawyer.
As film historian John McCarty wrote, it was "that rarity among gangster films to offer a female in the male-dominated mouthpiece role."
Author Roger Dooley identified the movie as "being the only film of the 1930s to concern itself with a pair of female legal partners".
Made after the Motion Picture Production Code came into effect, however, The Law in Her Hands was forced into adopting "a reactionary stance towards the gender switch", and concluded with a plot twist that was the complete opposite of the Pre-Code period (1929–1934), when "female characters on the screen could say, do, and be whatever they wanted."
After attending National Park Seminary in Washington, D.C., Lindsay convinced her parents to enroll her at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She went abroad to England to make her stage debut. She appeared in plays such as Escape, Death Takes a Holiday, and The Romantic Age.
She was often mistaken as being British due to her convincing English accent. Her fellow dramatic-school student Robert Cummings was then posing as the Englishman "Blade Stanhope Conway" and convinced Margaret Kies to follow his example and adopt a new British identity: Margaret Lindsay.  
She impressed Universal Studios enough to sign her for their 1932 version of The Old Dark House. As James Robert Parish and William T. Leonard wrote in Hollywood Players: The Thirties (Arlington House, 1976), Lindsay returned to America and arrived in Hollywood, only to discover that Gloria Stuart had been cast in her role in the film. After some minor roles in Pre-Code films such as Christopher Strong and the groundbreaking Baby Face, which starred Barbara Stanwyck, Lindsay was cast in the Fox Film Corporation's award-winning Cavalcade. Lindsay was selected for a small but memorable role as Edith Harris, a doomed English bride whose honeymoon voyage takes place on the Titanic.
She won the role by backing up her British accent with an elaborate "biography" that claimed she was born in a London suburb, the daughter of a London broker who sent her to a London convent for her education. "Although I looked and talked English... to tell them I was actually from Iowa would have lost the assignment for me," she later explained.
Her work in Cavalcade earned her a contract at Warner Bros. where she became a reliable supporting player, working with Paul Muni, Errol Flynn, Henry Fonda, Warren William, Leslie Howard, George Arliss, Humphrey Bogart, Boris Karloff and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.  Lindsay was cast four times as the love interest of James Cagney in Warner films from 1933 to 1935: Frisco Kid, Devil Dogs of the Air, G Men and Lady Killer.
 
Lindsay co-starred with Bette Davis in four Warners films: as Davis's sister in Fog Over Frisco (1934); in Dangerous (1935), for which Davis won her first Best Actress Academy Award; in Bordertown, co-starring Paul Muni, and, lastly, as Davis's rival for Henry Fonda's affections in Jezebel (1938), which earned Davis her second Best Actress Academy Award.
An example of her work in a leading role in lower budget films while at Warner Bros. was The Law in Her Hands (1936), a comedy in which she played a mob lawyer. As film historian John McCarty wrote, it was "that rarity among gangster films to offer a female in the male-dominated mouthpiece role." Author Roger Dooley identified the movie as "being the only film of the 1930s to concern itself with a pair of female legal partners". Made after the Motion Picture Production Code came into effect, however, The Law in Her Hands was forced into adopting "a reactionary stance towards the gender switch", and concluded with a plot twist that was the complete opposite of the Pre-Code period (1929–1934), when "female characters on the screen could say, do, and be whatever they wanted."
Margaret Lindsay