![]() ![]() She never struck Christopher as being sentimental or the least bit sorry for herself. Isherwood noted that the teenage Ross was "more essentially British than Sally she grumbled like a true Englishwoman, with her grin-and-bear-it grin. She had "a long, thin handsome face, aristocratic nose, glossy dark hair" with large brown eyes. Belying her humble circumstances in Berlin, the 19-year-old Ross was the offspring of a wealthy Scottish cotton merchant and came from a privileged background. Sally Bowles is based on Jean Ross, a vivacious British flapper and later an ardent Stalinist, whom Isherwood knew while sojourning in Weimar-era Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age. Jean Ross, a cabaret singer in the Weimar Republic, served as the primary basis for Isherwood's character. ![]() In June 1979, critic Howard Moss of The New Yorker commented upon the peculiar resiliency of the character: "It is almost fifty years since Sally Bowles shared the recipe for a Prairie oyster with Herr Issyvoo in a vain attempt to cure a hangover" and yet the character in subsequent permutations lives on "from story to play to movie to musical to movie-musical." The character of Sally Bowles inspired Truman Capote's Holly Golightly in his novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the character also has appeared in novels by other authors. Sally Bowles is a central character in the 1951 John Van Druten stage play I Am a Camera, the 1955 film of the same name, the 1966 musical stage adaptation Cabaret and the 1972 film adaptation of the musical. According to her daughter Sarah Caudwell, Ross never "felt any sense of identity with the character of Sally Bowles, which in many respects she thought more closely modeled on" Isherwood's gay friends, many of whom "fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the storm troopers looked in their uniforms". She believed her popular association with the naïve character of Bowles occluded her lifelong work as a political writer and social activist. įollowing the tremendous popularity of the Sally Bowles character in subsequent decades, Jean Ross was hounded by reporters seeking information about her colourful past in Weimar-era Berlin. Unsuccessful at both, Sally departs Berlin on the eve of Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany and is last heard from in the form of a postcard sent from Rome, Italy, with no return address. ![]() She aspires to be a serious actress or, as an alternative, to ensnare a wealthy man to keep her as his mistress. By night, she is a mediocre chanteuse at an underground club called The Lady Windermere located near the Tauentzienstraße. She is depicted by Isherwood as a "self-indulgent upper-middle-class British tourist who could escape Berlin whenever she chose." By day, she is an aspiring film actress hoping to work for the UFA GmbH, the German film production company. In the 1937 novella, Sally is a British flapper who moonlights as a cabaret singer in Weimar-era Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age. The character debuted in Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles published by Hogarth Press, and commentators have described the novella as "one of Isherwood's most accomplished pieces of writing." The work was republished in the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin and in the 1945 anthology The Berlin Stories. Sally Bowles ( / b oʊ l z/) is a fictional character created by English-American novelist Christopher Isherwood and based upon 19-year-old cabaret singer Jean Ross.
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