Sally Ann Howes

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Sally Ann Howes (born 20 July 1930) is an English actress and singer who holds dual British-American citizenship.

Her career on stage, screen, and television has spanned over six decades.

She is best known for the role of Truly Scrumptious in the 1968 musical film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

She was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in a Musical in 1963 for her performance in Brigadoon.

Personal life

Howes married Richard Adler in 1958, and adopted his sons Andrew and Christopher after their mother died in 1964. Howes and Adler divorced in 1966, though she continued raising the boys after their divorce. Howes recalled her marriage to Adler as a mistake stating, "We were both in show business but our values were very different. And his career was plummeting and mine was going great guns. And I made another mistake – I began turning down work because I thought if I was working and he wasn't, it would increase his insecurity." Christopher was a Broadway lyricist, and died of AIDS-related cancer in 1984 at the age of 30.

She was married to the English literary agent Douglas Rae from 1972 until his death in September 2021. According to her nephew, they were "inseparable".

Howes died in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, on 19 December 2021, at the age of 91.

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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.

Later career

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang did not, however, restart Howes' film career or launch a career for her in episodic television despite several guest-starring roles in Mission: Impossible, Marcus Welby, M.D., Branigan, and The Men From Shiloh. Even the pilot Prudence and the Chief, which was a spoof on The King and I, did not get picked up as a TV series. In addition, film musicals were now failing at the box office, and that avenue was closed to her. As a result, she returned almost exclusively to the stage, appearing in only a few more films and television productions.

"I would have liked a film career, but I didn't pursue it – I just loved connecting with an audience," said Howes. "The theatre is a drug. The problem is that to be remembered, you have to do films."

In the 1970s, she toured Britain with The King and I and later the United States with The Sound of Music. After her debut with the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera in 1972 with The Sound of Music, she returned to Britain to star in the stage drama, Lover, which was written specifically for her.

In the 1970s and 1980s, she began to cross over from standard musicals to operettas. She performed two summers with the Kenley Players in Blossom Time and The Great Waltz, and she later added Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow and then two seasons of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music at the New York City Opera. She also added the role of Gertrude in Hamlet to her repertoire. In the 1980s, she twice appeared in BBC TV's long-running Edwardian Music Hall programme, The Good Old Days.

She later said "The moment you hit 45... your career changes. You have to rethink everything, and you have to adjust. I was always aware of it because of the people I was brought up with. We saw careers go up and down and be killed off. I've never been prepared for anything, I've always jumped into the next thing, and therefore it's been a strange career. I've enjoyed experimenting. I've been so fortunate to be able to change – do cabaret, do concerts, or lectures."

In 1990, she debuted her one-woman show, From This Moment On, at the Edinburgh Festival and at a benefit for the Long Island AIDS Association at the John Drew Theatre in East Hampton, New York. Her last film was the 1992 miniseries Judith Krantz's Secrets. That marked her 50th year in film.

Her other projects included narrations of Cubby Broccoli, The Man Behind Bond on the release of the DVD Diamonds Are Forever in 2000, The Making of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang The Musical (2002), and her appearance in the documentary, After They Were Famous – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (2004).

Except for occasional lectures, charity functions, and some Broadway openings, she was semi-retired, although she still hosted events or performed two or three times per year. Over the period September 2007 to January 2008, she toured the U.S. in the Cameron Mackintosh production of My Fair Lady, appearing as Mrs. Higgins. When she was not performing, she was an artistic advisor for the Palm Beach Theatre Guild, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving the Royal Poinciana Playhouse in Palm Beach, Florida.

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