Meg Owen, better known professionally as Meg Wynn Owen, was born Margaret Shuttleworth on 8 November 1939 in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. She was not Welsh by birth or family background. At the age of 13 she went to live with her mother's friend Ruth Wynn Owen, a drama coach and actress of Welsh descent (though herself born in Watford, England), and after training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), graduating in 1956, she took her guardian's Welsh-sounding surname as part of her professional stage name. This site's original entry stated she was "born in Wales", which the evidence does not support.
Wynn Owen is best remembered for playing Hazel Bellamy in the London Weekend Television drama Upstairs, Downstairs (1973-1974), one of the defining British costume dramas of its era. Her film work included the 1972 screen adaptation of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, in which she played Lily Smalls, and later roles in The Duellists (1977), Gosford Park (2001), Love Actually (2003), Vanity Fair (2004) and Pride & Prejudice (2005). She continued acting into her seventies, appearing in a 2010 Christmas special of Doctor Who.
Despite having no Welsh ancestry of her own, Wynn Owen built a genuine and lasting professional connection to Wales: beyond Under Milk Wood, she played Welsh characters including Gwen Owen in the 1984 series Travelling Man and Lady Gwyneth Bromfield in an episode of Scarecrow and Mrs King, and in 2009 she performed as Mrs Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion at Clwyd Theatr Cymru in Mold, north Wales.
She was married to the Australian artist William Wright from 1967 to 1987. In later life she experienced dementia, and it emerged in 2022 that a friend to whom she had given power of attorney had been convicted of stealing tens of thousands of pounds from her bank accounts. She died in June 2022, aged 82.