Patricia Owens

Patricia Molly Owens (January 17, 1925 – August 31, 2000) was a Canadian actress, working in Hollywood.^[1] She appeared in about 40 films and 10 television episodes in a career lasting from 1943 to 1968.

Owens moved from Canada to England as a child.^[2] At 18, she made her motion-picture debut in the musical comedy Miss London Ltd .^[3] The following year, she had a small role in Harold French's social satire English Without Tears .^[4] Her career continued in this manner for a few years, Owens getting ever-larger roles in movies.

Her career received a boost when she was seen by a 20th Century Fox executive while performing in a stage production of Sabrina Fair , and was offered a screen test.^[5] The result was a contract with the studio and a move to Hollywood. Her first American film was Island in the Sun (1957), followed by No Down Payment , both for Fox, after which Owens was lent to Warner Bros. to appear in the critically acclaimed drama Sayonara (1957).^[6]

Owens spent the rest of 1957 working mostly on loan,^[5] but a successful Fox production secured her best known role, as Hélène Delambre, the wife of scientist André Delambre in The Fly (1958).^[7] Owens carried much of that horror film's narrative, which was largely presented in flashback from her character's point of view.^{[8] [9]}

None of Owens' subsequent films ever attained the same level of success as The Fly.^[5] She co-starred in the 1960 war film Hell to Eternity , then in 1961 appeared in the threadbare, backlot P.O.W./jungle chase drama Seven Women from Hell .^{[10] [11]} Owens made occasional television appearances, on series such as Perry Mason and Burke's Law , but these were relatively infrequent.^{[12] [13]} Owens starred in the 1959 episode "The Crystal Trench" of the series Alfred Hitchcock Presents .^[14] She was also in an episode of Tales of Wells Fargo titled "Assignment In Gloribee" in 1962.^[15] She plays an uptight, cynical Bostonian who is sent out west to write a "favorable" review of the west, on behalf of Wells Fargo.

By 1965, Owens was working in Black Spurs , a B-Western produced by A. C. Lyles, who was renowned for using older stars in that genre.^{[16] [17]} She retired from feature films in 1968 after portraying the love interest in the low-budget espionage thriller The Destructors.^[5] Later that same year, she made her last professional appearance in a televised episode of Lassie .^[18]

Owens was married and divorced three times. Her first husband, producer and screenwriter Sy Bartlett, and she were wed in 1956 and remained together for two years.^[19] She next married Jerome Nathanson in 1960, and they had one child before their divorce in 1961.^[20] Her third marriage was to John Austin from 1969 until their divorce in 1975.

• Patricia Owens at IMDb
• Patricia Owens at the TCM Movie Database Edit this at Wikidata

• 1925 births
• 2000 deaths
• Actresses from British Columbia
• Canadian expatriates in the United Kingdom
• Canadian people of Welsh descent
• People from the Columbia-Shuswap Regional District
• Canadian emigrants to the United States
• Canadian film actresses
• Canadian television actresses
• 20th-century Canadian actresses

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