She made her Broadway debut in Kenneth Seymour Webb's "One of the Family" at the 49th Street Theatre on December 21, 1925. She next appeared in another hit, Maxwell Anderson's "Saturday's Children," in 1926. It was Bondi's performance in Elmer Rice's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Street Scene", which opened at the Playhouse Theatre on January 10, 1929, that brought Bondi to the movies at the age of 43. Her debut movie role was as "Emma Jones" in "Street Scene" (1931), which starred Sylvia Sidney, and in which Bondi reprised her stage role, followed by "Mrs. Davidson" in "Rain" (1932), which starred Joan Crawford and Walter Huston.