Alun Davies Owen was a Welsh screenwriter and actor predominantly active in television.Born in Menai Bridge and his family moved to Liverpool when he was 8.His father, Sidney Owen,was a Welshman from Dolgellau,North Wales,and his mother,Ruth,was from Holyhead, but of Irish descent.Owen attended St Michael in the Hamlet Anglican Primary School and Oulton High School. For two years during the Second World War, he worked in a coal mine as a "Bevin Boy", before moving into repertory theatre as an assistant stage manager. From there he moved into acting, first with the Birmingham Repertory Company and then various other companies, appearing in small roles in films and to a greater degree in the newer medium of television during the 1950s.By the late 1950s,Owen was beginning to realise that his real ambitions lay in writing rather than performing, and he began to submit scripts to BBC Radio.His first full-length play, Progress to the Park, was produced by the Theatre Royal, Stratford East following its radio debut, and later in the West End.His play was his first to be written directly for television.Titled No Trams to Lime Street (1959), the Liverpool-set piece was presented in ABC Television's Armchair Theatre anthology strand, for which Owen continued to write plays into the 1960s. In 1964,when director Richard Lester was hired to direct The Beatles' first film, he remembered Owen from their previous work together on Lester's ITV television programme The Dick Lester Show in 1955.The Beatles were keen on Owen, impressed with his depiction of Liverpool in "No Trams to Lime Street";Owen spent some time associating with the band's four members to gain an ear for their characters and manners of speech.A Hard Day's Night earned him a nomination for the 1965 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay. In the same year, Owen contributed the libretto for a West End musical, composer Lionel Bart's Maggie May.Television continued to be his main medium
