Jill Haworth - The ORIGINAL Sally Bowles in the musical CABARET

Jill Haworth with Bert Convy (Cliff)

It's a mystery all her co-stars we nominated for Tony Awards and not her. I wonder what Kerr didn't like about her performance.

Kerr's review:

http://www.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?pagewanted=print&res=FC77E7DF1731E162BC4951DFB767838D679EDE&_r=0

"Cabaret is a stunning musical with one wild wrong note.

...

"We are left now with the evening's single, and all too obvious, mistake. One of the cabaret tables is empty, the table reserved for heroine Sally Bowles. Sally Bowles, as the narrative has it, is a fey, fetching, far-out lassie with a head full of driftwood and a heart she'd rather break than shackle. She is a temperament, and she needs a temperament to play her.

"Producer-director Harold Prince, in a totally uncharacteristic lapse of judgment, has miscast a pretty but essentially flavorless ingenue, Jill Haworth, in the role. Miss Haworth has certain skills and may be able to use them in other ways. Wrapped like a snowball in white fur and sporting that pancake tam that girls of the twenties used to wear whenever they were going to be photographed having snowball fights, she succeeds-at some angles-in looking astonishingly like Clara Bow. But her usefulness to this particular project ends there. She is trim but neutral, a profile rather than a person, and given the difficult things Cabaret is trying to do, she is a damaging presence, worth no more to the show than her weight in mascara.

"The damage is deeply serious and must be stressed."

@KathyNYC2: EXODUS was released in 1960 and was Jill Haworth's movie debut - - - and for her first movie she does give a very touching performance. Sal Mineo played her love interest and they soon became lovers in real life as well. Otto Preminger was so impressed with her that he cast her in THE CARDINAL and IN HARM'S WAY.

I think after CABARET her movie career never fully recovered and she wound up in B-Horror films and TV movies.

Sadly, she passed away on January 3, 2011.

She remained in New York City most of her life and was understandably upset when she was not invited to attend the opening of the 1998 Broadway revival of CABARET starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson.

Here is a wonderful profile of Jill Haworth written by Mr. Tom Lisanti

When the 1998 revival of Cabaret with Natasha Richardson and Alan Cumming opened on Broadway, the producers rudely snubbed Haworth. "Two years, four months, and ten days," recited Jill. "That's how long I played Sally on Broadway. You would think that would have earned me an invite to the opening." Maybe they couldn't find you, it was suggested. "Hell, I've been living in the same apartment since 1965," she exclaimed.


Jill Haworth: Her Life Was A Cabaret

Updated On: 11/30/14 at 01:50 PM

I have heard that her performances were inconsistent--she could be brilliant one night and the seem off the next, so that may have played a part. Love her on the recording.

@ DAME: ¿Estas bebiendo otra vez?

I wasn't. I was born in 1968.

I think Jill played Sally Bowles. (As did Natasha Richardson, Judi Dench, and recently, Michelle Williams.) I think Liza played Liza. It's a good movie, and she's wonderful, but it's not CABARET.

John Kander has said that Judi Dench was the most astonishing Sally ever. Judging from the London cast album, I think he's certainly right. She acts the F*CK out of that title song!

I agree. I've always thought of Sally as a naif with little girl qualities-- a lost little girl in too grown up a world. And I think Haworth probably pulled that off. Michelle Williams certainly did. I was a champion of her performance.

This still always gets me. I can only imagine how it played out.