Jean Ross

Jean Iris Ross Cockburn (; 7 May 1911 – 27 April 1973) was a British journalist, political activist, and film critic. A devout Stalinist, she became a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and she worked as a film critic for the Daily Worker. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), she served as a war correspondent for the Daily Express and as an alleged press agent for Joseph Stalin's Comintern. Throughout her lifetime, Ross wrote political criticism, anti-fascistpolemics, and socialistmanifestos for various organisations such as the British Workers' Film and Photo League.

During a youthful sojourn in the Weimar Republic, Ross worked as a nightclub singer in Berlin's lesbian bars and second-rate cabarets while aspiring to become a famous actress. In 1931, she shared lodgings with writer Christopher Isherwood until her eviction due to her sexual activities. Her escapades inspired the heroine and plot of Isherwood's 1937 novellaSally Bowles, collected in Goodbye to Berlin. In the 1937 novella, a British flapper named Sally Bowles 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 narrator. Isherwood based many details on actual events in Ross' personal life, including her abortion. Fearing a libel suit, Isherwood delayed publication of the work until given Ross' explicit permission. Goodbye to Berlin was later adapted into the stage play I Am a Camera and the musical Cabaret.

Although Isherwood never revealed that Ross inspired Sally Bowles until after her death, her former partner Claud Cockburn, who previously abandoned Ross and their daughter, leaked to the press that she inspired the character. After Cabaret gained widespread attention, tabloid reporters hounded Ross with intrusive questions. 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. Ross contended the character's political indifference toward fascism more closely resembled Isherwood and his gay friends, many of whom "fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the storm troopers looked in their uniforms". In 1986, her daughter Sarah Caudwell wrote a newspaper article in an attempt to correct the historical record and to dispel misconceptions about Ross.

In addition to inspiring the character Sally Bowles, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and other sources credit Ross as the muse for lyricist Eric Maschwitz's jazz standard "These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)". Although Maschwitz's estranged wife Hermione Gingold claimed to have inspired the lyrics, Maschwitz contradicted these claims. Maschwitz instead cited memories of a "young love", and most scholars and biographers credit Maschwitz's youthful affair with Ross as inspiring the song.