Varden began her career as a teenager in the first decade of the 20th century, acting with her aunts in a troupe that toured the western United States. She was on Broadway by age sixteen in 1910. It was not until the 1930s and into her forties that her stage career took off in the theater, notably playing Mrs. Gibbs, the small town matron who dreams of Paris, in the original production of Our Town. Varden's stage work mainly consisted of showy supporting roles although she did star in the ill-fated Return Engagement by Lawrence Riley. The 1950 melodrama Hilda Crane was a personal success for Varden although the play itself ran only two months. The following year she played the Nurse in a production of Romeo and Juliet starring Olivia De Havilland. Her final Broadway appearance in The Bad Seed was one of her acclaimed performances.
Radio and television
Varden occasionally appeared on radio from the early 1940s and well into the 1950s. She starred in radio productions of Hay Fever, The Silver Cord, and The Glass Menagerie among several other programs. She would later appear in a number of television productions during the 1950s, including an adaptation of Cradle Song, opposite Judith Anderson.
Film
Varden did not make her first film appearance until 1949 at age 56 with the film Pinky. She then went on to make over a dozen more films, including recreating her stage roles in the motion picture adaptations of Hilda Crane and The Bad Seed. Varden's best-known motion picture performance was as the gregarious storekeeper Icey Spoon in the 1955 film classic, The Night of the Hunter, based on the like-named novel. That performance garnered considerable acclaim, not least from the book's author, Davis Grubb. "Varden is almost my favorite person in the whole film. I thought she was perfect as Icey Spoon. She put things into that characterization that she should have gotten extra for. Because she got across the very subtle way of middle-aged women who are promoting the marriage of a younger woman to an attractive male, they themselves are very sexually excited by the whole thing. It's a sixty-year-old yenta's way of getting off. She did more with a little sigh..." Varden's career was still going strong at the time of her death. Immediately prior to taking ill in January, Varden was appearing in London, earning kudos for her portrayal of an American mother in Lesley Storm's comedy, Roar Like a Dove. Just weeks before her death, that turn earned Varden the award for Best Supporting Performance for 1957/1958, as judged by drama critics of the NationalBritish press.
Personal life
Varden was married twice: first to fellow thespian Charles Pearce Coleman, from 1914 until their divorce in 1921, and then, from 1921 until her death, to Baltimore-based hotel operator William J. Quinn.
