Her first important film was
A Yankee from the West (1915) under the name Signe Auen at the age of 21. She later was convinced to change her name and settled on Seena Owen, the phonetic spelling of her real name. One day, Owen showed up with her eyes swollen nearly shut, her co-star
Lillian Gish wrote in her memoir. Also in 1916, Owen married
George Walsh whom she had met on the set of
Intolerance. The marriage lasted until their divorce in 1924. A regular player for the rest of the silent era, Owen appeared in films such as
Maurice Tourneur's
Victory in 1919 where she was photographed to great effect by Tourneur's cameraman,
Rene Guissart.
Victory, long lost, was recently found in 35mm print in Europe and can be seen on DVD. In 1920, she appeared in
The Gift Supreme with
Lon Chaney, who appeared with her in
Victory. All but one reel of
The Gift Supreme is lost. She co-starred with
Gloria Swanson and
Walter Byron in the ill-fated
Queen Kelly (1928), as the mad queen who whips Swanson in one scene. With the arrival of sound in movies, Owen's weak voice became a problem and forced her to retire from movies in 1933. After her retirement, she worked on a number of films in the 1930s and 1940s as a screenwriter, including two starring
Dorothy Lamour:
Aloma of the South Seas (1941) and
Rainbow Island (1944). The former was written in part with her sister,
Lillie Hayward, a successful Hollywood screenwriter. ==Death==