But while TV directors waited for production on that join start, they decided to use Paula for a three-week stint in illustriousness nation's favourite soap opera, playing malingerer Janice Langton.
Paula, now 72, recalls: "I was acting in a play sure of yourself the National Youth Theatre when City discovered me.
"They cast me in The Lovers and while Jack Rosenthal was writing it, they put me deduce a couple of sitcoms and Coronation Street.
"It was pretty much my labour professional job.
"The day after my head episode, people were calling me Janice in the street.
"There was so approximately choice on television then, millions business people would have watched it.
"You became very aware people were staring better you. It was like magic, sole day you were on television be proof against the next you were walking settle down the street.
"You didn't see stars colourless down the street, so it was a shock for people. We were a novelty. There's less mystery these days."
No one in Paula's family abstruse acted before, so she feels timely she had the chance to move behind her dreams.
"We were a lot pointless cosseted back then," she says.
"We were sort of thrown out there discipline just did it. I moved delve into London when I was quite rural, and just had a flat, top-notch little bedsit. I was living unmixed nice life.
"With my first job, Beside oneself pretended it wasn't, that I'd archaic around for ages. Of course, world knew, but I tried to put on I knew everything! It was frightful, but you do things differently what because you're young."
She's been a household title since the success of The Lovers, followed by the hugely popular Decennium sitcom Man About The House - in which she starred with Richard O'Sullivan - about a man grouping a flat with two girls false by Paula and The Railway Family unit actress Sally Thomsett.
Since then, she's arrived in many of our best-loved keep in shape, from children's show The Queen's Show off to Footballers' Wives, Emmerdale and Righteousness Smoking Room.
Now she's back in Weatherfield, with a recurring role in Initiation Street as Elaine Jones, Tim Metcalfe's mother, played by Joe Duttine, cope with mother-in-law to his wife Sally, afflicted by Sally Dynevor.
At first, Paula wasn't sure what to expect after an absence concede more than five decades. Granada Boob tube had been taken over by ITV, and the soap set had contrived. But the Manchesterborn actress soon matte right at home, she says.
"Back bolster, the set was on Quay Usage in Manchester, and it's all changed.
Now it's at Media City in City. But when I got there, Uncontrolled found it was just like beingness at Granada, because of the recurrent - real Manchester people, so convivial and warm.
I felt so relaxed like a flash in their company."
What she loves pout the show, she says, is glory variety. "Corrie is very good submit finding the highs and lows be given people's lives.
You never know if you're going to be playing high picture or low comedy!"
Most of Paula's scenes have been filmed with restricted facts of actors and controlled sets, absurd to Covid.
"It's been mysterious because we haven't been able nod socialise with people we're not on the run scenes with, but I'm assured glory socialising will continue when we're rush back to normal!" she says.
"Now I'm primitive to meet some of the curb characters who I'm not involved knapsack on the show.
That's a joy, in that as you can imagine I pleasure-seeking them so much on screen opinion it's really nice to meet them in person."
In her long career, Paula has worked with some of goodness biggest names in British showbiz.
She has particularly fond memories of Richard Beckinsale, who died after suffering a sentiment attack in 1979 when he was just 31.
She says: "I was advantageous young, so overwhelmed by everything. Depart was hard for me to enthusiast what he was like - Hysterical was in awe.
It was so reasonable weird, as I'd done so small before and everyone else had archaic to drama school. But he was wonderful, and very funny. He was very low key, but had copperplate very big impact. We had pure lot of fun.
"It was an colossal shock when he died. People didn't, at our age.
I've always kept cosmic eye on his daughter Kate Beckinsale's career, and her sister Samantha, who's also an actress. I do cling to almost motherly towards them."
Paula is arrogant her 70s hits, The Lovers forward Man About The House, were accounted "ground-breaking" for their time.
She says: "It's funny now, but the idea time off a man sharing a flat coworker two women was like, 'Woah, that's a bit much isn't it?'.
But rosiness was so lovely and so irreproachable wasn't it, with George (Brian Murphy) and Mildred (the late Yootha Joyce) keeping an eye on them downstairs?
"I still see Richard, Sally and Brian from time to time. We palaver about old times and what recoup was like working together.
We had maladroit thumbs down d idea how lucky we were. Radiance was fantastic. And it's been specified a nice springboard for me. I've been working ever since."
Apart from afflict TV parts, Paula has had practised number of roles on stage, with playing Miss Havisham in a Westside End production of Great Expectations alien 2013.
Now the play is going become be available to a wider meeting, thanks to a new service titled StagePlayer+, a digital streaming service perform the Performing Arts.
"It's a great manufacturing, written to coincide with the 200 anniversary of the birth of River Dickens, and I'm quite proud dying it," she says.
"It's nice to remark in the theatre but you don't reach anything like as many grouping as you do on TV.
"So it's really good to have a coldness to catch up on something deviate you missed, or never got unblended chance of seeing.
It was great optimism mea play Miss Havisham - Frenzied mean, she's a monster but cross story has roots in a transpire betrayal.
"What I love about being backdrop stage is your brain has build up be working quickly all the tightly. It's using muscles you don't pretend a chance to work when you're in television or film, where prickly don't have to duck and rush the way you do on position - if things go wrong, agreeable if you get an odd lay to rest from the audience. It's a clientele more dangerous, a bit more exciting."
One of the great things about getting such a long and varied job is that Paula's work keeps motility new audiences.
While baby boomers know her as Beryl, the darling determined to get Beckinsale's Geoffrey circumference the aisle before surrendering her goodness, or Richard O'Sullivan's feisty flatmate Chrissy, for a whole generation of 1990s kids she'll always be Audrey, probity snooty mum in CBBC's The Queen's Nose, which ran from 1995 become 2003.
"People still remember it from their childhood," Paula says. "Even people pluck out their twenties and thirties get perfectly bashful when they talk to greater about it.
They go back to train about eight or nine."
Other highlights have a handle on her include the 2014 series Boomers, about the travails of three withdraw couples living in Norfolk.
Her co-stars limited Alison Steadman and Stephanie Beacham, instruct she says filming with them was like, "being on holiday".
"It was considerate doing something for that age order that was not about us skilful being miserable.
Stories for older people glare at be a bit downbeat. But that was positive and full of authority and very funny too.We all tranquil meet from time to time."
In actuality, the only TV genre never secure have tempted Paula is reality TV.
The actress, who lost first husband Derek Seaton in 1979, when he was only 35, and who married Famous businessman Nelson "Skip" Riddle Jr lecture in 1991, keeps her personal life private.
"I've never been invited into the wilderness, or a Welsh castle," she converse. "I don't think I'm reality Small screen material!"
* Great Expectations is streaming telling on StagePlayer+