SALLY ANN HOWES

(20 July 1930 - 19 December 2021)

She might mainly be remembered for her part as Truly Scrumptious in the musical film of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but the British actress and singer Sally Ann Howes, who has died aged 91, enjoyed a long career on stage, in films and on television. She was originally a child performer born into a theatrical family, her father being the actor-comedian-singer Bobby Howes and her mother the actress and singer Patricia Malone. Sally made her first film appearance in Rodney Ackland's Thursday's Child (1943) with Wilfrid Lawson and Stewart Granger, then The Halfway House with Mervyn and Glynis Johns which led to other films including Dead of Night, Pink String and Sealing Wax and The History of Mr Polly.

She made more films as well as stage musicals such as Fancy Free and Sandy Wilson's Caprice. On television she was in Bet Your Life with Arthur Askey and Julie Wilson and TV movies of Paint Your Wagon and Brigadoon. She also appeared in stage productions of My Fair Lady, Blossom Time, The Great Waltz, I Do! I Do!, Camelot, The King and I and The Sound of Music among many other theatre works. She was nominated for a Tony Award for Brigadoon in 1962.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang came in 1968 after which she mainly appeared on television in the likes of Mission: Impossible, The Virginian, The Hound of the Baskervilles, etc. In 1990 Sally Ann Howes played Desiree in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music for the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center. She was married first to the actor H. Maxwell Coker, then to the composer-lyricist Richard Adler, whose two children she adopted, then Andrew Morgan Maree, and finally the agent Douglas Rae from 1973 until his death in 2021.

MICHAEL DARVELL