Though his father wanted him to be a doctor, Bushman was bitten by the acting bug in childhood and played walk-on roles in various Baltimore stock companies. In 1903 he won a local strongman's contest, which led to several years' steady work as a sculptor's model. After attending Maryland's Ammendale College, he launched his professional acting career, making his Broadway debut in 1908. While performing in Chicago in 1911, he was invited to make films with the Essanay company. Rapidly ascending to stardom, he was signed to a contract stipulating that his wife and children not be publicized, so as not to spoil his image as an “accessible” screen lover. Accordingly, the studio listed his birthplace as Norfolk, Virginia, to throw researchers off the track.

In 1918 Bushman's wife sued for divorce, citing Beverly Bayne as corespondent. According to some sources, the ensuing scandal was fomented by the Metro executives, who resented Bushman's demand for a huge insurance policy in exchange for appearing in the 1917 serial The Great Secret. Whatever the case, when Bushman and Bayne, whom he married after the divorce was final, left Metro in 1919, their movie careers effectively screeched to a halt. They appeared together onstage and made a few films for their own production company, but by 1924 both actors were being written off as “yesterday's stars” by the trade papers. In 1925 Bushman staged a spectacular comeback as Messala in MGM's Ben-Hur; within two years, however, he was blacklisted, allegedly because he had offended Louis B. Mayer (Mayer, Louis B). Divorced from Bayne in 1928, he freelanced at several minor studios until the end of the silent era. When his $6 million fortune was wiped out by the 1929 Wall Street crash, Bushman virtually had to start over. He returned to the stage, played a handful of small film roles, and acted in some 2,500 radio programs.

Adhering to the motto “Take things as they come, fear nothing and nobody,” Bushman never considered himself a has-been, nor did Hollywood society treat him as such. On promotional tours for the Twentieth Century Fox films Wilson (1944) and David and Bathsheba (1951)—in which he appeared fleetingly as Bernard Baruch and King Saul, respectively—he was besieged by enthusiastic fans. In his final years Bushman appeared on several television series and briefly ran a Hollywood memorabilia shop.