Sally Ann Howes, the British actress known best for her role as Truly Scrumptious in the 1968 family musical “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” has died at age 91.
“My brother & I thought Sally Ann might hold on until the Christmas screening of ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ as this would have greatly appealed to her mischievous side,” her nephew tweeted.
Howes began her career as a child actor, appearing in “Thursday’s Child” after a family friend, an agent, suggested her, then the 1944 drama “The Halfway House,” which landed her at Ealing studios in London as a contract player.
Through her childhood, she continued working, starring in “Anna Karenina,” opposite Vivien Leigh, “Dead of Night” with Michael Redgrave and “Nicholas Nickleby.”
In 1958, Howes moved to the U.S. to star in “My Fair Lady” on Broadway, replacing Julie Andrews as the down-on-her-luck Eliza Doolittle.
After going home to England for the short-lived “The Sally Ann Howes Show,” she returned to the U.S. and Broadway for runs in “Kwamina,” a revolutionary interracial love story based in Africa with an almost entirely Black cast, “What Makes Sammy Run?” and “Brigadoon” at the New York City Opera.
A 1966 TV adaptation of “Brigadoon,” which reunited Howes with some of her Broadway cast, won five prime-time Emmy awards.
But it was “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” that made Howes a household fixture, in which she played the bright, bubbly daughter of a confectionery magnate who served as the love interest to Dick Van Dyke’s Caractacus Potts.
“It was the most difficult thing in the whole world,” Howes told Rosie O’Donnell of the “Music Box” number, during which she poses as a wind-up doll. “I really was very proud of it. I did it on the set. I was a bit nervous about it, with about 150 extras [looking on]. They put me up on this box and off I went. And I got it in one take!”
In later years, Howes returned to the stage in tours of “The King & I” and “The Sound of Music,” as well as her own one-woman show, “From This Moment On.”
Howes was most recently working with the Palm Beach Theatre Guild in Florida, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the Royal Poinciana Playhouse.
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