Picture: Roy Tan
The British actress and singer Sally Ann Howes may well be remembered for playing Truly Scrumptious, but she also had a long career before that in films, on stage and on television. She had a beautiful voice and a lovely personality to match. Michael Darvell looks back at her fascinating career of over 60 years.
Sally Ann Howes was born into a theatrical family; her father was the actor, comedian and singer Bobby Howes (1895-1972) and her mother the actress and singer Patricia Malone (1899-1971) whose father was Captain Joseph Malone, a London theatre director, while his brother, Pat Malone, was an actor. With such a family heritage perhaps it was inevitable that young Sally Ann would follow in both her father’s and her mother’s footsteps into the theatrical profession. The Howes had two children, daughter Sally Ann and her brother Peter Howes who became a musician.
Sally Ann was born in London in July 1930, but the Howes moved to their family home in Hertfordshire where they lived during the Second World War. Their neighbours were also theatricals, the husband and wife team of Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge. Young Sally Ann got a taste of performing while still at school where she appeared in amateur productions but it was a visiting agent who set the girl on the road to success as a professional actress.
Attending an audition for a film, she won the role after over 200 other girls had been turned down for the part of a girl rather like Sally Ann herself who is chosen to star in a film, beating her own sister to a role her sibling actually wanted for herself. The film was Thursday’s Child, written and directed by the actor turned playwright and director Rodney Ackland who is credited as discovering Sally Ann in 1943 when she was just 13 years old. Her co-stars were Wilfrid Lawson and Stewart Granger.
Sally Ann’s first film led to her being offered a contract with Ealing Studios where she appeared in The Halfway House, Dead of Night, Pink String and Sealing Wax, Nicholas Nickleby, My Sister and I and Anna Karenina. After Ealing Films she gained a seven-year contract with the Rank Organisation. However, becoming tired with the sort of films she was making then, which did nothing to exploit her vocal abilities, Sally Ann headed for the theatre and took singing lessons to improve her voice and bring it down to a lower level. Her first musical comedy show was called Fancy Free (but not the Jerome Robbins dance piece) and she then went on to do Cinderella for BBC Television in 1950 and Sandy Wilson’s first musical, Caprice.
She was by then regularly appearing on radio and television including Bet Your Life with Arthur Askey, Brian Reece and Julie Wilson and a TV movie of The Golden Fool. With her father, Bobby Howes, Sally Ann appeared in the Lerner and Loewe musical Paint Your Wagon, which ran for nearly 500 performances from 1953 at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the West End. Then in 1956 she played in Summer Song at London’s Prince’s Theatre (now the Shaftesbury) alongside David Hughes, Edric Connor, Laurence Naismith and Bonita Primrose. The music was taken from the works of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak set to lyrics by Eric Maschwitz.
As if to prove that she was more than just a musical comedy performer, Sally Ann had an enormous personal success in the play A Hatful of Rain, Michael V. Gazzo’s drama about morphine addiction. However, she did not completely desert the musical stage as she took over from Julie Andrews in Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady on Broadway in 1958. This was the third time of their asking her, as she had previously been approached for the show’s US tour, then to take over in 1957 but at that time she was working on a film, but she accepted the third time around and made a delightful Eliza Dolittle.
Sally Ann Howes was a performer who never seemed to be out of work or short of offers. If she wasn’t on stage or filming, she was more than likely guesting on the television shows of Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Jack Paar or Ed Sullivan. After her time in My Fair Lady she returned to the UK and filmed her own TV variety show. Back on Broadway in the 1964 she also appeared in a stage musical production by Ervin Drake of Budd Schulberg’s book What Makes Sammy Run? with Robert Alda and Steve Lawrence, Sigmund Romberg’s Blossom Time, My Fair Lady again and Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot. She was nominated for a Tony Award for Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon in 1962, and a television production of the same show with Sally Ann, Robert Goulet, Peter Falk and Finlay Currie won several Primetime Emmy Awards in 1966.
Sally Ann had married her second husband, the composer-lyricist Richard Adler in 1958. He was the author of The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, Rex and Fosse among many other shows. For Sally Ann he wrote Kwamina, about the son of a tribal chief returning home to Africa after studying in London, but finding life has changed. It had a short run on Broadway in 1961. Adler also wrote The Gift of the Magi, based on a story by O. Henry, which appeared on television with Sally Ann. And with Bob Merrill Adler collaborated on a musical version of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage for his then wife to play Mildred.
Sally Ann’s film career had virtually drawn to a close in 1957 with her appearance in The Admirable Crichton with Kenneth More, Diane Cilento and Cecil Parker. However, 11 years later Chitty Chitty Bang Bang came along, giving her the well-deserved part of Truly Scrumptious opposite Dick Van Dyke. It was to be her last film of any importance but live theatre still occupied her for most of her working life from the 1970s onwards with productions of The Great Waltz, The Sound of Music, The King and I, Robert and Elizabeth, I Do!, I Do!, Hans Andersen with Tommy Steele, Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow, Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, Frank Loesser’s Where’s Charley?, Jerry Herman’s Dear World and My Fair Lady again – as Mrs Higgins. She put on her one-woman show From This Moment On in 1990. There were also occasional productions of straight plays such as Hamlet (as Gertrude), Noel Coward’s Semi-Monde, George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman and James Joyce’s The Dead.
For the rest of the time Sally Ann was on TV, radio or in the recording studio. All in all Sally Ann Howes had a pretty truly scrumptious career. Before she married Richard Adler she was first married to actor H. Maxwell Coker, then Andrew Morgan Maree, and finally theatrical agent Douglas Rae from 1973 until his death in 2021. She had adopted Richard Adler’s two children after their mother died.
Sally Ann Howes: born on 20 July 1930 in London; died on 19 December 2021 at Palm Beach Gardens, Florida aged 91. R.I.P.
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