Early Life and Budding Career
Rowena Wallace was born in Coventry, United Kingdom, an only child. She moved to Australia with her parents when she was five. Initially she grew up in Cairns and later moved to Brisbane at the age of 12 years. Here she attended Kedron State High School and was taken by her mother to dancing lessons and also persuaded to join the Twelfth Night Theatre in Bowen Hills. Her father was a pilot for Ansett Airlines.
At age fifteen, Wallace left school and attended a business college at the insistence of her parents when she decided to become an actress, and also joined an advertising agency while still performing in the theatre at night. She then joined television in Brisbane as an entertainer on the variety show Theatre Royal (hosted by George Wallace Jr., no relation), and she also hosted the afternoon news and weather and a children's show. At the age of nineteen, Wallace was diagnosed with scoliosis (curvature of the spine). She has been on painkillers almost permanently since then.
Wallace was working in television in Brisbane when Barry Creyton persuaded the producers of a new series to fly Rowena down to Sydney to audition for the lead role in their show; as a result Wallace won the role of Margie Harris in You Can't See 'Round Corners and moved to Sydney.
After completing Corners, she went on to star as the juvenile lead in a hit comedy stage production with John McCallum and Googie Withers. The show, Relatively Speaking, played to packed audiences in Melbourne.
On 12 February 1970, the film Squeeze a Flower had its world premiere in Sydney. Wallace starred in the movie as the female lead opposite international film veteran, Walter Chiari. By 1972, she had found work intermittent. In 1973 she married George Assang (d. 1997), a Thursday Island-born jazz singer known professionally as Vic Sabrino. The marriage lasted just over a year, and Wallace has had no long-term relationships since then.
Later in the 1970s she appeared frequently in Australian television, with an on-going role in the soap opera Number 96 in 1975–1976, followed by a regular role in the police drama Cop Shop playing policeman's wife Pamela Taylor. After leaving that series she played a mentally unbalanced remand prisoner Anne Griffin in Prisoner for several weeks in late 1980.
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