Silent films

In 1907, Nilsson was named "Most beautiful woman in America".^{[citation needed]} The noted cover artist, Penrhyn Stanlaws, chose her as one of his models which led to her feature role in the Kalem Motion Picture Company's 1911 film Molly Pitcher.

She stayed at the Kalem studio for several years, ranked behind its top star Alice Joyce, before branching out to other production companies. Films of special note are Regeneration (1915) Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917), Soldiers of Fortune (1919), The Toll Gate and The Luck of the Irish (both 1920), and The Lotus Eater (1921).^[2][3] In 1921, while on a rare vacation return to Sweden, she was asked to film Värmlänningarna, her only Swedish movie.^[4]

In the 1920s, she freelanced successfully for Paramount, First National and many other studios and reached a peak of popularity just before the advent of talkies. In 1923, she was severely burned while filming a scene in which she drove a locomotive through a forest fire for Hearts Aflame;^[5] she required a week to recuperate, but that did not impede her career.^[6] That year, she made nine movies,^[6] including portraying "Cherry Malotte" in the second movie based upon Rex Beach's The Spoilers, a role that would be played in later versions by Betty Compson (1930), Marlene Dietrich (1942), and Anne Baxter (1955).^[7] In 1926, she was named Hollywood's most popular woman. She welcomed royalty when the Swedish Crown Prince Gustav Adolf (later King Gustaf VI Adolf) and his wife Louise Mountbatten visited Hollywood. In 1928, she set a record for fan mail, some 30,000 letters per month, and in that year Joseph P. Kennedy brought her to his newly formed film company RKO Radio Pictures. The following year, as she was horse riding, she fell off the horse, was thrown against a stone wall and broke her hip. After a year of hard training, she was on her feet again.^[8] In 1928, Anna Nilsson made her last film of the silent era, Blockade.

Sound films

With the introduction of sound films, Nilsson's career went into a sharp decline, although she continued to play small, often uncredited parts in films into the 1950s. Between 1930 and 1950, she participated in 39 sound films in smaller roles. She played the role of the Swedish immigrant mother of Loretta Young in The Farmer's Daughter (1947). Her best known performance in a sound film is arguably her turn as herself, referred to as one of Swanson's "waxworks" in Sunset Boulevard (1950), where she has one line.

Nilsson has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6150 Hollywood Boulevard for her contribution to motion pictures. She was the first Swedish-born actress to receive such an honor.