Perhaps best known as the man-hungry Mabel in Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), Lightner was often typecast as a wise-cracking gold-digger and was known for her talents as a comedian and singer. She is also noted for introducing the song "Singin' in the Bathtub" in the 1929 motion picture The Show of Shows.
Winifred Josephine Reeves was known as Winifred Hansen.[why?]
Starting off in vaudeville at age fifteen and adopting Winnie Lightner as her stage name, she was an immediate success and played the fabled Palace theater in New York City only three months after beginning her career.[citation needed] With vaudeville in decline in the early 1920s, she switched to Broadway revues, where she starred in George White's Scandals of 1922, 1923, and 1924, in Gay Paree in 1925 and 1926, and in Harry Delmar's Revels in 1927.

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