Trivia

As well as playing Emma Newton in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), she also rewrote the scene with Teresa Wright and Macdonald Carey which takes place in the garage. The film's director, Alfred Hitchcock, as well as the actors, were reportedly unhappy with the dialogue as written and she was asked to alter it. Ultimately, Hitchcock liked her changes and used them.

She appeared with Teresa Wright in three films, playing her aunt in The Little Foxes (1941), and her mother twice in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Casanova Brown (1944).

She was one of several writers to work on the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's film Lifeboat (1944), and had actually co-starred with the film's lead actress, Tallulah Bankhead, in the original Broadway production of The Little Foxes. Bankhead was considered to recreate her role as Regina Giddens in the film adaptation, The Little Foxes (1941), but after her box office appeal was questioned, Bette Davis was cast instead.

She emigrated to the United States from England with her mother in 1907.

She was the first actress to play the enduringly popular character Pollyanna, though her performance was confined to the stage. She starred as Pollyanna in Catherine Chisholm Cushing's four-act adaptation of the novel, which opened at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway on September 18, 1916, and ran for 112 performances. The novel was later successfully adapted for film, most notably as Pollyanna (1920), starring Mary Pickford, and Pollyanna (1960), starring Hayley Mills.

Originated the role of Birdie Hubbard in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes on Broadway in 1939, before recreating the role for the big screen two years later in The Little Foxes (1941), which was also her film debut. Her performance earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, but she lost to Mary Astor for The Great Lie (1941). The only other actors to recreate their roles from the original play were Charles Dingle, Dan Duryea, John Marriott and Carl Benton Reid.

Aside from being an actress, Collinge was a playwright, author, and columnist. In 1938, her play "Dame Nature", an adaptation of a French drama by André Birabeau was published. She also co-wrote (with Margalo Gillmore), "The B.O.W.S.", a play about the American Theatre Wing unit which performed "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" to soldiers in Italy and France during World War II, as well as "The Small Mosaics of Mr. and Mrs. Engel", a story of travel in Italy, for which she received a gold medal from the Italian government. Several of Collinge's short stories were published in the New Yorker and was also a contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

She made her stage debut on December 21, 1904 at the age of 12, appearing as a Chinese doll in a production of "Little Black Sambo and Little White Barbara" at the Garrick Theatre in London. Her first New York stage appearance took place on December 7, 1908, when she was 16 years old, as a flower girl in "The Queen of the Moulin Rouge" at the Circle Theatre on Broadway.