Sally Ann Howes

Sally Ann Howes will be best remembered as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s Truly Scrumptious, but her career on stage and screen both before and after the iconic 1968 film was evidence of a substantial talent that was lightly worn and underappreciated.

Howes was born in London to a family of performers – her father Bobby Howes was a star of stage and screen; her mother, Patricia Malone, an actor and singer; her grandfather, JAE Malone, a noted director of musicals for the London stage.

Aged 13, she found early fame in the 1943 film Thursday’s Child, written and directed by Rodney Ackland, in which she made an impression as a child actor who becomes a star. She followed it with several films, including The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947) and the Vivien Leigh-starring Anna Karenina in 1948, when the Rank Organisation signed her to a seven-year contract from which she later extricated herself.

On radio, she became a regular support to the fast-emerging Peter Sellers, made early stage appearances with the Overture Players in Bromley and her Royal Variety Show debut in 1951. The following year saw her introduction to the West End in the Arthur Askey-starring musical comedy Bet Your Life at the Hippodrome.

In 1953, she was seen alongside her father in a partnership The Stage hailed a “triumph” in Paint Your Wagon at Her Majesty’s. Then in his ascendancy as a tyro critic with London’s Evening Standard, Kenneth Tynan was less persuaded, launching into his review with the caustically punning “A plague on both your Howeses”.

Taking over from Julie Andrews as Eliza in My Fair Lady, she made her Broadway debut in 1958, a performance that earned her the cover of Life magazine and prompted Richard Rodgers to declare her “the greatest singer who ever sang on the American musical stage”.

Four more appearances on the Great White Way followed, 1963’s Brigadoon garnering a Tony award nomination – the first such for a performer in a revival – and her New York swansong, Richard Nelson and Shaun Davey’s adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead, winning her a Drama Desk award in 2000.

Her casting in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in preference to Julie Andrews persuaded Dick Van Dyke, uncertain about reprising his partnership with Andrews following Mary Poppins, to commit to the role of Caractacus Potts. Although the film failed to match the critical success of the earlier Disney hit, it gave Howes her signature legacy role.

Turning away from film, she concentrated instead on the stage. In 1973, she was seen in an American tour of The Sound of Music, a UK tour and West End run in the Adelphi of The King and I, and alongside Max Wall in Brian Clemens’ thriller Lover in St Martin’s.

In 1977, she co-starred with Tommy Steele in Hans Andersen at the Palladium and over the next two decades made sporadic appearances on American television, most notably in a New York City Opera broadcast of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music (1990) and in Judith Krantz’s glitzy soap-opera Secrets (1992).

Later stage work included Gertrude to Hilton McRae’s Hamlet with the New Shakespeare Company (1983), her own solo show, From This Moment On, at the 1990 Edinburgh Festival, and as Mrs Higgins in an American tour of My Fair Lady for Cameron Mackintosh in 2007.

Her complicated personal life saw her marrying four times: first to the American actor H Maxwell Coker, then to the Broadway composer Richard Adler. Her third marriage dissolved within a year, her fourth, to the literary agent Douglas Rae in the early 1970s, lasting until his death in September 2021.

Sally Ann Howes was born on July 20, 1930, and died on December 19, 2021, aged 91.