Jean Ross

For the Canadian physician and politician, see Jean Auguste Ross.

Jean Ross
Jean ross.jpg
Ross in c.1931
Born
Jean Iris Ross

(1911-05-07)7 May 1911
Alexandria, Egypt[1]
Died27 April 1973(1973-04-27) (aged 61)
Richmond, Surrey, England
Occupation(s)Film critic, writer, singer
Employer(s)Daily Worker (film critic)
Daily Express (war correspondent)
Partner
See list
ChildrenSarah Caudwell[4]
RelativesOlivia Wilde[5] (step-granddaughter)

Jean Iris Ross Cockburn[a] (/ˈkoʊbərn/; 7 May 1911 – 27 April 1973) was a British journalist, political activist, and film critic.[6] During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), she was a war correspondent for the Daily Express and is alleged to have been a press agent for Joseph Stalin's Comintern.[7] A skilled writer, Ross worked as a film critic for the Daily Worker. Throughout her life, she wrote political criticism, anti-fascist polemics, and socialist manifestos for a number of disparate organisations such as the British Workers' Film and Photo League.[8] She was a devout Stalinist and a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.[9]

During her itinerant youth in the Weimar Republic, Ross was a cabaret singer and aspiring film actress in Berlin. Her escapades inspired the heroine in Christopher Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles which was later collected in Goodbye to Berlin,[10][11] a work cited by literary critics as deftly capturing the hedonistic nihilism of the Weimar era and later adapted into the stage musical Cabaret.[12] In the 1937 novella, Sally is a British flapper who moonlights as a chanteuse during the twilight of the Jazz Age. After a series of failed romances, she becomes pregnant and has an abortion facilitated by the novella's narrator.[13] Isherwood based many of the novella's details upon actual events in Ross' life, including her abortion.[3][14] Fearing a libel suit, Isherwood delayed publication of the work until given Ross' explicit permission.[15][16]

For the remainder of her life, Ross believed the public association of herself with the naïve and apolitical character of Sally Bowles occluded her lifelong work as a professional writer and political activist.[17] Her daughter Sarah Caudwell, who shared this belief, later wrote a newspaper article in an attempt to correct the historical record and to dispel misconceptions about Ross.[18] According to Caudwell, "in the transformations of the novel for stage and cinema the characterisation of Sally has become progressively cruder and less subtle and the stories about 'the original' correspondingly more high-coloured".[18]

In addition to inspiring the character Sally Bowles,[19] Ross is credited by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and other sources as the muse for lyricist Eric Maschwitz's jazz standard "These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)", one of the 20th century's most enduring love songs.[20] Although Maschwitz's estranged wife Hermione Gingold later claimed the song was written for herself or actor Anna May Wong,[21] Maschwitz contradicted these claims.[22] Instead, Maschwitz cited memories of a "young love",[22] and most scholars and biographers posit Maschwitz's youthful affair with Ross inspired the song.[20]

  1. ^ Parker 2005, p. 206.
  2. ^ Brown 2016.
  3. ^ a b Parker 2005, p. 220.
  4. ^ Stasio 2000.
  5. ^ Mosley 2003, p. 120.
  6. ^ Williams 1996, p. 265; Whaley 1969, p. 44; Jardine 2014.
  7. ^ Williams 1996, p. 265; Whaley 1969, p. 44; Fyrth 1999.
  8. ^ Forbes 2011, pp. 206–19.
  9. ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 100–101; Croft 1989, p. 156; Firchow 2008, p. 120.
  10. ^ Garebian 2011, pp. 6–7.
  11. ^ Izzo 2005, p. 144: "Isherwood's Sally Bowles was based on Jean Ross, a spunky British woman whom he met during his Berlin days with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender".
  12. ^ Grossman 2010: The Berlin Stories "form one coherent snapshot of a lost world, the antic, cosmopolitan Berlin of the 1930s, where jolly expatriates dance faster and faster, as if that would save them from the creeping rise of Nazism".
  13. ^ Izzo 2005, p. 144: "The abortion is a turning point in the narrator's relationship with Sally and also in his relationship to Berlin and to his writing".
  14. ^ Lehmann 1987, pp. 28–9; Gallagher 2014.
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference Libel Suit was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ Parker 2004; Lehmann 1987, p. 29.
  17. ^ Croft 1989, p. 156; Firchow 2008, p. 120.
  18. ^ a b Caudwell 1986, pp. 28–29.
  19. ^ Garebian 2011, p. 4.
  20. ^ a b Parker 2004; Brown 2016.
  21. ^ Gingold 1989, p. 54.
  22. ^ a b Maschwitz 1957, pp. 77–79.


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