She started singing in a band for £2 a night as a way of earning extra money while attending drama school. In Manchester, under the name Karol Keyes (named after her management, Keystone Promotions), she fronted Karol Keyes and the Big Sound, a band previously known as The Fat Sound. One of her first records was an Ike & Tina Turner song called “A Fool in Love”, released on Columbia. She left that band in June 1966; subsequently, as Luan Peters (a name she adopted in the late 1960s), she succeeded Tina Charles as frontwoman of 5000 Volts. A year later, she joined Joan Littlewood’s drama school at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

She was also active on television in series such as: Z-Cars, Public Eye, Coronation Street (playing series regular Lorna Shawcross in 1971), Doctor Who (in the serials The Macra Terror in 1967, and Frontier in Space in 1973), Target, The Professionals, and the Fawlty Towers episode “The Psychiatrist” in which she played Raylene Miles, an Australian tourist. Her last known television role was in an episode of The Bill in 1990. In 2005, she was interviewed for the documentary Fawlty Towers Revisited.

In 1971 she starred in Not Tonight Darling a drama directed by Anthony Sloman

In 1972, she starred in the unbroadcast television series Go Girl, as a go-go dancer caught up in thriller situations. The pilot episode, possibly the only one made, was released twice on UK video in the early 1980s, first as Give Me a Ring Sometime (the pilot episode title) and later as Passport to Murder.

Luan Peters died on Christmas Eve 2017, but her death was not made public until June 2018.