Sally Ann Howes (20 July 1930 – 19 December 2021) was an English actress and singer, whose career on screen, stage and television spanned six decades. She was best known as a leading lady of musical theatre, both on the West End and on Broadway. She was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in a Musical for her performance in Brigadoon in 1963, and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical for James Joyce's The Dead in 2000. She was also known for portraying Truly Scrumptious in the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Childhood and early film career
Howes was born on 20 July 1930, in St John's Wood, London, the daughter of British comedian/actor/singer/variety star Bobby Howes (1895–1972) and actress/singer Patricia Malone (1899–1971). She was the granddaughter of Capt. J.A.E. Malone (died 1928), London theatrical director of musicals, and she had an older brother, Peter Howes, a professional musician and music professor. Her great-grandfather, Captain Joseph Malone, was awarded the Victoria Cross in 1854 at the Charge of the Light Brigade. Her uncle, Pat Malone, was an actor on stage, films, and television.
Howes moved to the family's country house in Essendon, Hertfordshire, for the duration of World War II. She was a show-business baby who lived a quiet, orderly childhood, where she grew up with a nanny and was surrounded by a variety of pets and her parents' theatrical peers, including actor/writer Jack Hulbert and his wife, actress Cicely Courtneidge, who had an adjoining house.
Her first taste of the stage was school productions, but as she came from a theatrical family, another family friend, an agent who was visiting the Howes family for dinner, became impressed with her and not long after suggested the young Sally Ann for a role in a film. Two hundred young girls had already been screen tested without success, and the producers were desperate to find a talented little girl to play the lead, and they asked her father to please rush in some pictures on the recommendation of the agent. The film, Thursday's Child, was written by playwright and screenwriter Rodney Ackland, also a close neighbour to the Howes family, and it would become Ackland's directorial debut. Thursday's Child (1943) launched her career.
A second film, The Halfway House (1944), in which she plays a major role as a teenager trying to get her parents to stay together, led to Howes being put under contract by Michael Balcon of Ealing Studios, and this was followed by many other film roles as a child actress, including Dead of Night (1945) with Michael Redgrave, Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), Nicholas Nickleby (1947), My Sister and I (1948), and Anna Karenina (1948), with Vivien Leigh.
At the age of 18, the Rank Organisation put Howes under a seven-year contract, and she went on to make the films Stop Press Girl (1949), The History of Mr. Polly (1949) with John Mills, Fools Rush In (1949), and Honeymoon Deferred (1951). She married Maxwell Coker in 1950.
On a teacher friend's recommendation, Howes took singing lessons – not only to bring out her natural talents, but in an effort to lower her speaking voice, which was quite high. While still in her teens, she made her first musical-comedy stage appearance in Fancy Free. In late 1950, she starred in a BBC TV version of Cinderella.
The same year, Howes accepted her first professional stage role in the Sandy Wilson musical Caprice. She terminated her contract with Rank, where she had been unhappy with the film roles she'd received, and with being "lent out" to other studios. She was finding gainful employment in television and radio, and looking to flex her singing talent, something Balcon and Rank had overlooked. Caprice was followed by Bet Your Life with Julie Wilson, Arthur Askey, and Brian Reece, with whom Howes was also simultaneously on radio. She participated in a TV version of The Golden Fool.
In 1953, she starred in the West End in the musical Paint Your Wagon with her father, Bobby Howes, which ran for 18 months. It was followed by Summer Song, also in the West End, firmly establishing Howes as a leading musical comedy star.
Then came her critically acclaimed performance in the stage drama A Hatful of Rain. In the early-to-mid-1950s, Howes's career expanded to include television appearances, modelling, commercials, and product endorsements.
Howes appeared as a comics character in TV Fun serial comics and annuals, as a young, wholesome teacher in the wild American West (at a time when Western TV shows were very popular). She appeared on many magazine covers, most notably Life (3 March 1958), when she took over Julie Andrews's role in My Fair Lady on New York City's Broadway.
Howes was offered the part in My Fair Lady twice before: first, to join the musical's U.S. touring company (which she declined); and second, to replace Andrews on Broadway – which, at the time, conflicted with Howes's commitment to film The Admirable Crichton (1957) with Kenneth More. My Fair Lady creators Lerner and Loewe were persistent, though, and Howes accepted the third time, with a year's contract, and at a higher salary than Andrews. Howes was an instant hit as Eliza Doolittle.
In January 1958, Howes married Tony-winning composer Richard Adler (The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees). The following December, she appeared in Adler's musical television adaptation of O. Henry's short story The Gift of the Magi (1958), which Adler wrote expressly for her. Adler and Bob Merrill also collaborated on a musical version of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage so Howes could play Mildred.
She appeared on many TV shows, including those of Perry Como and Dinah Shore, and Jack Paar's The Tonight Show in 1962. She appeared on The Bell Telephone Hour, The Kraft Music Hall, and The United States Steel Hour, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show four times.
When her contract in My Fair Lady ended, she returned to Britain to tape six 1-hour installments of The Sally Ann Howes Show, a variety show for ITV, the British commercial television network.Howes was invited to sing for US presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. She became a frequent guest panellist on game shows and was known for her quick, spontaneous answers.
She returned to Broadway in 1961 in the short run of Kwamina, another musical Adler wrote for her, where she starred opposite Terry Carter. That same year, she starred in an hour-long television adaptation of Jane Eyre.
In 1962, she starred in a short revival of the musical Brigadoon at the New York City Opera, and received a Tony nomination, the first performer to be nominated for a revival performance. She recreated the role in a private White House performance at the invitation of President and Mrs. Kennedy.