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.

In 1964, she gave a fine performance as a cold blooded beautiful, yet murderous woman, who uses men to her satisfaction in the S9E32 episode “Scott Free” on the TV Western series Gunsmoke.

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 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 AllMovie
• Patricia Owens at the TCM Movie Database