Key points:
- Entertainer and artist who played Truly Scrumptious in the 1968 film Chitty Bang.
Even though she never featured in any unique creations of his shows on Broadway, Richard Rodgers depicted Sally Ann Howes, who has kicked the bucket matured 91, as “the best artist who at any point sang on the American melodic stage”. Most popular for playing Truly Scrumptious inverse Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts in the film Chitty Bang (1968), Howes was an exemplary case of the star who never truly was, despite her ability and immaculate family.
She had double ethnicity in Britain and the US, like Julie Andrews, in whose track she followed, first as a kid star in Quite a while previously, then after the fact the subsequent universal conflict, then, at that point, as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady in 1958. The show denoted her Broadway introduction, and she played in it for a year and a more significant compensation than her archetype. At the point when Andrews declined the job of Truly Scrumptious, she ventured.
In 1973 the slopes were alive once more, not with the sound of Julie, but rather of Sally, as she drove a US visit through The Sound of Music. The potential gain of this almost star status was that Howes could settle on amazing and brave decisions in her work, like showing up in a West End thrill ride, Lover (likewise 1973) by Brian Clemens, with Max Wall, or a melodic adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead (2000), with Blair Brown and Christopher Walken, off-Broadway and, momentarily, on.
Even though she was six years more seasoned than Andrews, the equal vocation tourist spots of both were uncanny. Three years before Andrews made her name in New York in Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend (1954), Howes made her stage debut in a show for which Wilson had composed the verses, Caprice (1951), a melodic satire of homegrown disarray in the south of France, at the Alhambra Theatre in Glasgow.
Tragically, on her absolute first number on any stage, the guide bungled the score to the floor and Howes needed to sing unaccompanied while the music sheets were boisterously assembled, the instruments got their places individually and, following them probably, she adjusted bit by bit once again into the right key. The show never arrived at the West End.
