Researching Jean Ross

Born in Rimouski, Canada East, the son of John Ross and Caroline Talbot, Ross was educated at Ste. Anne and Rimouski Seminaries. He received his medical education from Université Laval and then started practicing medicine in Rimouski. He was also Coroner for the District of Rimouski and a Quarantine Officer for the port. He was first elected to the House of Commons of Canada for the electoral district of Rimouski in an 1897 by-election. A Liberal, he was re-elected in 1900, 1904, and 1908. He was defeated in 1911.

During her itinerant youth in the Weimar Republic, Ross was a cabaret singer and fashion model in Berlin. Her Berlin escapades served as the basis for the fictional character Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories, a work literary critics cited as deftly capturing the hedonistic nihilism of the Weimar era and was later adapted into the stage musical Cabaret. For the remainder of her life, Ross believed the public association of herself with the naïve and apolitical character of Bowles occluded her lifelong work as a professional writer and political activist. 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. 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".

In addition to inspiring the character Sally Bowles, 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. Although Maschwitz's estranged wife Hermione Gingold later claimed the song was written for herself or actor Anna May Wong, Maschwitz contradicted these claims. Instead, Maschwitz cited memories of a "young love", and most scholars posit Maschwitz's youthful affair with Ross inspired the song.