1. Jean Iris Ross Cockburn was a British journalist, political activist, and film critic.
45 Facts About Jean Ross
1. 2.
Jean Ross was a devout Stalinist and a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
3.
Jean Ross's escapades inspired the heroine in Christopher Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles which was later collected in Goodbye to Berlin, a work cited by literary critics as deftly capturing the hedonistic nihilism of the Weimar era and later adapted into the stage musical Cabaret.
4.
Isherwood based many of the novella's details upon actual events in Jean Ross' life, including her abortion.
5.
Jean Ross was raised in luxury at Maison Ballassiano in the British protectorate of Alexandria, Egypt, She was the eldest daughter of Charles Ross, a Scottish cotton classifier for the Bank of Egypt and brought up with her four siblings in a staunchly liberal, anti-Tory household.
6.
Jean Ross became openly rebellious when informed she must remain at school for another year to repeat her already completed coursework.
7.
Jean Ross falsely insisted to the headmistress that she was pregnant and the Leatherhead Court schoolmasters sequestered the teenager in a nearby insane asylum until a relative arrived and retrieved her.
8.
In 1930, at nineteen years of age, Jean Ross and fellow Egyptian-born Hungarian actor Marika Rokk obtained cinematic roles portraying a harem houri in director Monty Banks' Why Sailors Leave Home, an early sound comedy that was filmed in London.
9.
Subsequently, Jean Ross was the only woman in this circle of gay male writers, who mythologised her in their respective memoirs.
10.
Jean Ross's face was long and thin, powdered dead white.
11.
Jean Ross had very large brown eyes which should have been darker, to match her hair and the pencil she used for her eyebrows.
12.
Isherwood further described the youthful Jean Ross as having a physical resemblance to Merle Oberon but said her face naturally had a sardonic humour akin to that of comedian Beatrice Lillie.
13.
Isherwood visited these nightclubs to hear Jean Ross sing, and he described her voice as poor but nonetheless effective:.
14.
Meanwhile, Jean Ross entered into a variety of heterosexual liaisons, including one with musician Gotz von Eick, who later became an actor under the stage name Peter van Eyck and starred in Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear.
15.
Either during their brief relationship or soon after their separation, Jean Ross realised she was pregnant.
16.
Cockburn later said he persuaded Jean Ross to become a left-wing journalist and secured her employment at the Daily Worker.
17.
Jean Ross became an active and devoted Party member for the remainder of her life.
18.
Jean Ross had spent only around eighteen months in Berlin between 1932 and 1933 but became fluent enough in German to allow her to obtain work as a bilingual scenarist with Austro-German directors who had fled the Nazi regime.
19.
Jean Ross, who was aware Isherwood was living in poverty, persuaded Viertel to hire him as a translator.
20.
Anxious to avoid a libel suit, Isherwood implored Jean Ross to give him permission to publish the story.
21.
Now deeply committed to the socialist cause, Jean Ross noticed Isherwood's story undermined her standing "among those comrades who realised she was the model for Sally Bowles".
22.
Around 1934 and 1935, Jean Ross wrote a manifesto for the short-lived British Workers' Film and Photo League and served as its General Secretary.
23.
Between 1935 and 1936, Jean Ross worked as a film critic for the Communist newspaper Daily Worker using the alias Peter Porcupine, which she presumably adopted as a homage to radical English pamphleteer William Cobbett, who had used the same pseudonym.
24.
In mid-September 1936, while the Spanish Civil War was in its first year, Jean Ross met English poet and anti-fascist John Cornford at the Horseshoes pub in England while in the company of his friend John Sommerfield.
25.
In September 1936, Jean Ross travelled to war-torn Spain either in the company of Claud Cockburn or separately.
26.
Jean Ross served with a mitrailleuse unit, and fought in the Battle of Madrid in November and December 1936.
27.
Amid the rubble, Jean Ross reported on the death toll and interviewed survivors including mothers whose children had died in the bombardment.
28.
Jean Ross proceeded to Andujar where, amid the ongoing battle and machine-gun fire, she interviewed Colonel Jose Morales, a commander of the southern armies.
29.
Jean Ross's friends noted Ross "had a comforting air of calmness about her".
30.
Jean Ross continued reporting on the progress of the war, often from the front lines of the Republican forces, for the next year.
31.
In late 1938, while pregnant with Claud Cockburn's child, Jean Ross witnessed the final months of the Siege of Madrid and endured aerial bombardment by Francoist forces.
32.
Sixty days after the fall of Madrid, Jean Ross gave birth to a daughter by Cockburn.
33.
Some sources say Jean Ross did not marry Cockburn due to her political beliefs about women's emancipation, but under British law, Cockburn still was married to his first wife Hope Hale Davis; he could not marry Jean Ross at that time without committing bigamy.
34.
Whether Jean Ross knew Cockburn was still legally married to Davis is unknown.
35.
Several months before her daughter's birth, Jean Ross filed a deed poll in which she changed her surname to Cockburn.
36.
Jean Ross later told an acquaintance "having a man around was like having a crocodile in the bath".
37.
Jean Ross became friends with Isherwood's old acquaintance Edward Upward and his wife Hilda Percival, both of whom were socialist in outlook.
38.
Much like Jean Ross, Mangeot had been an apolitical bohemian in her youth and transformed with age into a devout Stalinist who sold the Daily Worker and was an active member of various left-wing circles.
39.
Jean Ross went on to teach law at Oxford and became a senior executive at Lloyds Bank, and later a celebrated author of detective novels.
40.
On 27 April 1973, Jean Ross died at her home in Richmond, Surrey, aged 61, from cervical cancer.
41.
Above all, Jean Ross resented Isherwood's depiction of Jean Ross expressing antisemitic bigotry in his 1937 novella Sally Bowles.
42.
Jean Ross never cared enough to be moved to any public rebuttal.
43.
Jean Ross said her vindictive former partner Claud Cockburn leaked to the press that she had inspired the character.
44.
Jean Ross steadfastly declined invitations to watch Cabaret or any related adaptations.
45.
Sally Bowles, the fictional character inspired by Jean Ross, has been portrayed by a number of actors; Julie Harris in I Am a Camera, the 1951 adaptation of Goodbye to Berlin and the 1955 film adaptation of the same name; Jill Haworth in the original 1966 Broadway production of Cabaret; Judi Dench in the original 1968 West-End stage version of Cabaret; Liza Minnelli in Bob Fosse's 1972 film adaptation of the musical, and Natasha Richardson in the 1998 Broadway revival of Cabaret.