Biography

Anna Edwards was born in India in 1834, the daughter of a cabinetmaker who died three months before her birth. Her mother then remarried to officer in the Engineers who sent Anna and her sister, Eliza, to a school in England. The girls returned to India as teenagers and Anna escaped her stepfather's plans to marry her to a man twice her age by accompanying Rev.Percy Badger on a tour of the Middle East. She married a clerk, Thomas Leon Owens, and they had two children, a daughter Avis and a son, Louis. Her husband had trouble keeping a job, and moved his family a great deal; for some unknown reason, he also changed his name to Thomas Leonowens. After her husband died of apoplexy in Penang, Malaya, Anna moved to Singapore, where she received an invitation to teach English to the children of the Siamese King. She later embellished her memoirs of this time (changing her place of birth to Wales, and taking three years off her age; making her husband a major in the British army instead of a lowly clerk; and adding the tale of a concubine's brutal death, which never happened) which became famous. Anna herself retired to Canada, where she became a suffragist before her death. Her sister, Eliza, was the grandmother of the famous actor Boris Karloff.
- IMDb mini biography by: Nichol

Decided that Siam was no place to raise a girl so she sent her daughter Avis away to school and took only her son Louis with her when she went to the Siamese court to become governess to the King of Siam's children.

Had four children. The eldest two died in infancy. The surviving children: daughter Avis, and son Louis.

Combined her husband's middle and last names to give her the name 'Leonowens.' Why she did this is a little unclear, but many people believe she was trying to reinvent herself and not be connected with her Indian origins, as she had hid her partial Indian heritage all her life.