Biography:

Sally Ann Howes (20 July 1930 – 19 December 2021) was an English actress and singer. Her career on screen, stage and television spanned six decades. She is best known for the role of Truly Scrumptious in the 1968 musical film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.^[2] In 1963, she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in a Musical for her performance in Brigadoon.^[2]

Childhood and early film career

Family

Howes was born on 20 July 1930, in St John’s Wood, London,^[1] the daughter of British comedian/actor/singer/variety star Bobby Howes (1895–1972) and actress/singer Patricia Malone (1899–1971).^[1] 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.^[2]

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.

Thursday’s Child

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.^[2]

Ealing

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,^[2] Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), Nicholas Nickleby (1947), My Sister and I (1948), and Anna Karenina (1948), with Vivien Leigh.^[1]

Credits: