Owens moved to England in 1933 with her parents (her Welsh father Arthur Owens was later to become an MI5 double agent), and ten years later, at age 18, she made her motion-picture debut in the musical comedy Miss London Ltd. The following year, she had a small role in Harold French’s social satire English Without Tears. Her career continued in this manner for a few years, Owens getting ever-larger roles in movies.

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

None of Owens’ subsequent films ever attained the same level of success as The Fly. She co-starred in the 1960 war film Hell to Eternity, then in 1961 appeared in the threadbare, backlot POW/jungle chase drama Seven Women from Hell. Owens made occasional television appearances, on series such as Perry Mason and Burke’s Law, but these were relatively infrequent. Owens starred in the 1959 episode “The Crystal Trench” of the series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

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. She retired from feature films in 1968 after portraying the love interest in the low-budget espionage thriller The Destructors. Later that same year, she made her last professional appearance in a televised episode of Lassie.