Edith Williams was a granddaughter of 19th-century American actor Lawrence Barrett^.  She entered the entertainment industry at age 16 in a staging of Walter Hampden’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac. At age 19, in 1926, she appeared with Hampden in Caponsacchi. During the 1930s, she performed with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre troupe.

While appearing in the Mercury Theatre 1937 production of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, she married leading man Vincent Price in 1938. The marriage ended in 1948. She and Price had one son, author/poet and environmental activist Vincent Barrett Price (born 1940). Her biggest Broadway success was as star of the now-obscure production Mrs. Moonlight.
  She made her first film in 1941, playing one of the two half-witted half-sisters of Ida Lupino’s homicidal character in Ladies in Retirement. Her most famous movie role was likely that of Mrs. Holland’s mother-in-law in I Walked with a Zombie (1943). She was almost three years younger than her “son” in that film (played by Tom Conway). She appeared briefly onscreen with Price in Keys of the Kingdom (1944). The following year she was seen as Mrs. Fairfax in 20th Century-Fox’s adaptation of the real Jane Eyre (1944). She retired from films after essaying a minor role in The Swan (1956).