After finishing high school, Dorothy Lee went to vaudeville, sang with Fred Waring and His Pennsylvaninans and made her film debut in Syncopation (1929). In Rio Rita (1929) she was teamed with Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey and appeared in almost all of their movies, like Margaret Dumont in The Marx Brothers' films. She had a short marriage to Hollywood gossip columnist Jimmy Fidler in 1931. After the Wheeler and Woolsey team split up, her career drifted away and she left the film business in 1939. She returned for a few more films in the early '40s, but then permanently retired after that.