The writer Christopher Isherwood first met Jean Ross at the dawn of the 1930’s in Berlin. Two English strays who had washed up sharing a boarding house in the Schoneberg district, they were both intent on taking full advantage of the hedonistic freedom of the Weimar Republic, in that brief breath between the wars. She was only nineteen, and was working as a cabaret performer.
Here she is with ‘her air of not caring a curse of what people thought of her’.
Knocked out by her vivacity, Isherwood set about immortalising her as the character Sally Bowles, most notably in ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ (1939). By way of a broadway play and several further incarnations, she was definitively played by Liza Minelli in her spellbinding turn in the film ‘Cabaret’ (1972).
One of my favourite films – Minelli captures the originality of Isherwood’s original muse – as vulnerable as she is amusing.
