[2] In 1910 at 6 years old Rose brought Pauline to New York City to find her work in the newly established silent movie industry and on the stage, getting her bit parts in a variety of movies, as well as weekly stage performances in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Little Lord Fauntleroy for the Jack Packard Stock Company.

[2] In 1915 she played the ingenue Claudia Frawley in Life Without Soul, an adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

She soon landed the role of Princess Irina of Russia in Herbert Brenon's The Fall of the Romanovs, her first Hollywood work and, according to Variety, her best known.

In 1926 Curley played with Helen Chadwick, Jack Mulhall, and Emmett King, in The Naked Truth.

On December 16, 2000, Curley died 8 days before her 97th birthday of complications resulting from pneumonia at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica.