Niesen began singing as a career in the early 1930s, performing on radio and in night clubs. She first appeared on film (credited as
Gertrude Nissen) with
Roger Wolfe Kahn and His Orchestra and
Artie Shaw in a
Vitaphone short film,
Yacht Party (1932). On
old-time radio, Niesen was the featured singer on
The Ex-Lax Big Show on
CBS and host of
The Show Shop (1942), on NBC-Blue. She left
The Ex-Lax Big Show in the summer of 1935 to sing leads in musical productions of the
St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre. She recorded for
Victor,
Columbia, and
Brunswick in the 1930s, and in 1933 was the first to record the song "
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", by
Jerome Kern and
Otto Harbach. She appeared in the Broadway musical
Calling All Stars in 1934 and in the
Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. Niesen's singing at a cafe in Hollywood led to her signing a contract with Universal.
Start Cheering (1938), and ''A Night at Earl Carroll's
(1940), in which she sang a song that she co-wrote, "I Want to Make with the Happy Times". Her other films included Rookies on Parade
(1941), This Is the Army (1943), He's My Guy
(1943), and The Babe Ruth Story (1948). She co-starred with Jackie Gleason in the 1944 stage musical Follow the Girls'', in which she sang "I Want to Get Married", one of her better-known songs. She recorded for
Decca Records throughout the 1940s, and released a self-titled
LP for the label in 1951. She also appeared on many radio shows and on TV in the early 1950s. ==Personal life and death==