Baltimore-born Edwin Thanhouser got into "show business" as an actor in a traveling repertory company. He eventually formed his own acting companies and took them on the road, too.

He also managed a successful theater company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and eventually moved to Chicago and leased a theater there. Unfortunately, his Chicago theater was not as successful as his Milwaukee one and he was forced to shut it down. Taking notice of the burgeoning motion picture business, he moved to New York City, which at the time was the center of the US film industry, to get into it and then to New Rochelle, NY, where he opened his own motion picture studio, the Thanhouser Film Corp. His company's first production was released in 1910.

His studio turned out a string of successful films and Thanhouser sold it two years later. He took his family on a tour of Europe and stayed there for almost two years, returning to the US when World War I broke out. It was then he discovered that the man to whom he sold his studio had died in an auto accident and the company was in trouble. Eventually he was asked to return as head of the company, and in 1915 he did so. Unfortunately, he didn't realize how much the public's tastes and attitudes had changed during his two-year absence from the industry, and the company slid further and further into disarray. In 1918 it was dissolved. That same year Thanhouser retired from the film industry and turned to taking care of his investments in the stocks and securities business.