A clear soprano and a straight back, made for the stage and borrowed by the screen once in a way that stuck. Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the part she is known for, and it asked little of her.
Fi1m perspective
In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) Sally Ann Howes plays Truly Scrumptious, and the script gives her a motor car, a father and a name, and nothing to want. That was our verdict when we reviewed the film and we stand by it. She sings cleanly and looks the part. What the film did give her was one number: the Doll on a Music Box, a technically demanding dance she learned on a crash course for the purpose. It is the best thing she does in the film. We were surprised how much we minded when she started moving like a person again.
The film sat in the middle of her career and at the edge of it. She had been a child actor since Thursday's Child (1943), through Ealing's Dead of Night (1945) and Anna Karenina (1948) with Vivien Leigh, and by the early 1950s she had left the screen for musical theatre: first the West End, alongside her father Bobby Howes in Paint Your Wagon (1953), then Broadway in 1958, where she took over Eliza Doolittle from Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady and kept the part for a year. Brigadoon followed in 1963, as Fiona MacLaren. Richard Rodgers called her "the greatest singer who ever sang on the American musical stage".
Then Ken Hughes put her opposite Dick Van Dyke, the film went round the world, and she went back to the stage. The King and I, The Sound of Music, touring through the 1970s and 80s, guest parts in episodic television with Mission: Impossible among them, and a late Mrs Higgins in a 2007 My Fair Lady tour. Her film work barely grew after 1968. Lewis Gilbert's The Admirable Crichton (1957), with her as Lady Mary opposite Kenneth More, is the other one worth looking for, and it uses the same thing Hughes used: a poise that reads as breeding, a voice that reads as money. Not every stage vehicle ran; Kwamina (1961) closed after 32 performances.
The difficulty for a critic is that the work she cared about is gone. We can only judge what was filmed, and what was filmed is a handful of well-bred parts and Truly Scrumptious. She knew it. "The theatre is a drug. The problem is that to be remembered, you have to do films." She made one that is remembered and went back to the drug. What is left of her on film that matters is the doll on the music box, and we would not swap it for most of the film around it.
Biography
Sally Ann Howes was an English actress and singer. She appeared in films from the age of twelve and maintained a career in theatre, film and television that lasted six decades.
She is best known for playing Truly Scrumptious in the musical film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). On stage she replaced Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle in the Broadway production of My Fair Lady (1958) and received a Tony Award nomination for Best Lead Actress in a Musical for her performance in Brigadoon (1963).
Her other screen credits include Dead of Night (1945), Anna Karenina (1948), The Admirable Crichton (1957) and Death Ship (1980). She held dual British and American citizenship.
