Sally Bowles

Sally Bowles () is a fictional character created by English-American novelist Christopher Isherwood and based on 19-year-old cabaret singer Jean Ross. The character debuted in Isherwood's novella Sally Bowles, published in October 1937 by Hogarth Press. Critics regard the novella as among Isherwood's most accomplished works of fiction. The work was republished in the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Hogarth Press and in the 1945 anthology The Berlin Stories by New Directions. In the 1937 novella, a British flapper named Sally Bowles moonlights as a cabaret singer in Weimar-era Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age. By day, Sally aspires to be a film actress employed by UFA, the German production company. By night, she works as a chanteuse at an underground club called The Lady Windermere near the Tauentzienstraße. Hoping to become a famous actress or the mistress of a wealthy man, Sally engages in a series of sexual flings, becomes pregnant, and undergoes an abortion. She departs Berlin on the eve of Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany. Sally Bowles appears as 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. The character purportedly inspired Truman Capote's Holly Golightly in his 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, and she appears in novels by other authors. In June 1979, critic Howard Moss commented on the character's remarkable longevity over many decades: "It is almost fifty years since Sally Bowles shared the recipe for a Prairie oyster with Herr Issyvoo [sic] in a vain attempt to cure a hangover" and yet the character lives on "from story to play to movie to musical to movie-musical." Following the popularity of the Sally...