Jeanne Moreau had been first choice and Bancroft was only six years older than Hoffman. She was not perhaps the most obviously sexual of Holly wood stars. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, she was a little too serious to be natural casting in the role of temptress. But the scene in which Mrs Robinson attempts to seduce the family friend Ben Braddock has become one of the best-known of the 1960s, deliciously combining representations of the sexual awakening of the younger generation and the corruption of the older one.
It helped of course that Mrs Robinson gave her name to one of Simon and Garfunkel’s most popular songs. "And here’s to you, Mrs Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know," sang the airwaves. Many years later the film was turned into a stage play in the West End and on Broadway and Mrs Robinson was played by Kathleen Turner, Jerry Hall and Linda Gray, whose legs substituted for those of Bancroft on the film poster.
Anna Maria Louise Italiano was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1931, the daughter of Italian immigrants. Her father worked in the garment industry and her mother was a switchboard operator at the famous Macy’s department store. She appears to have been a natural entertainer, she was only about four when she began taking dance and acting classes and she was involved in drama throughout her school years.
In her teens Bancroft had various short-term jobs, though she also continued acting, attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, appeared on local radio and made her television debut in an adaptation of Turgenev’s The Torrents of Spring in 1950.
Using the name Anne Marno, she worked regularly on live television drama and had a recurring role on the Jewish family comedy The Goldbergs. Over the years Bancroft was to play a string of Jewish characters, including Golda Meir on Broadway. Her choice of roles, change of name and marriage to the Jewish director and comedian Mel Brooks probably led to some confusion over her ethnic origins. "Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever played Italian," she once said. Darryl Zanuck feared she might end up playing nothing but Italians and told her she had to change her name when she signed for Twentieth Century Fox. "He gave me a list of names," she said. "They sounded like strippers’ names. Bancroft was the only one with any dignity." She made her film debut in 1952 as a singer in the thriller Don’t Bother to Knock, with Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe.
The two young actresses got on well. "Marilyn played the part of a baby sitter, who has done some very destructive things to this child," said Bancroft. "It was a scene where they were bringing her down to the lobby to be held for the police . . . There was just this scene of one woman seeing another woman who was helpless and in pain . . . and she was helpless and in pain. It was so real, I responded. I really reacted to her. She moved me so that tears came to my eyes."
After two years with Fox, Bancroft went freelance and between 1952 and 1957 she appeared in 15 films of all sorts, including the musical Tonight We Sing, the sword-and-sandal epic Demetrius and the Gladiators, with Victor Mature, the thriller Nightfall and the western The Restless Breed. "I played [the impresario] Sol Hurok’s wife and I played some kind of a princess and then I played a couple of Indian roles and lots of gangster’s relatives," she said dismissively. "In reality, every picture I did was worse than the last one." During that time she married Martin May, heir to a Texan oil fortune, and seemed to have the world at her feet, but the strains of stardom told on the marriage and her personal life. Bancroft was drinking heavily and growing increasingly dissatisfied in Hollywood, until finally she packed up, turned her back on fame and fortune and went back to New York to pursue her career on stage.
Starring roles in two plays written by William Gibson and directed by Arthur Penn were to bring a brace of Tony awards and the recognition as one of America’s best actresses that had eluded her in Hollywood.
First came Two for the Seesaw (1958), in which Bancroft played a kooky Jewish ballet-dancer, who has an affair with a lawyer, played by Henry Fonda. Bancroft studied at the Actors’ Studio, the New York studio associated with the intense method acting technique, and she was duly compared with its acclaimed alumnus Marlon Brando. So successful was she in becoming her character in Two for the Seesaw that she had to go to therapy to find her true self again.
It was followed by The Miracle Worker (1959), with Bancroft as Annie Sullivan, who takes on the challenge of teaching communication skills to Helen Keller (played by 12-year-old Patty Duke), who is blind, deaf, mute and antisocial. Bancroft’s character is herself almost blind. To prepare for the role Bancroft spent weeks working with blind children and to experience the loss of sight for herself she tried to go about life in an unfamiliar neighbourhood with bandages over her eyes.
A true story, The Miracle Worker made for harrowing and unsentimental drama. It also provided Bancroft with a triumphant return to movies in 1962 after a five-year gap. Duke reprised the role of Keller in the film, which was also directed by Arthur Penn, and Duke and Bancroft both won Academy Awards. Bancroft was on Broadway in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children on the night of the awards and her Oscar was presented to her on stage a week later by Joan Crawford.
After several unhappy relationships Bancroft met Mel Brooks on The Perry Como Show in 1961 and they married three years later. He was by this time a leading comic and writer, although his success with The Producers, his first feature film, was still several years away.
Bancroft won her second Oscar nomination as a British woman, with eight children and an unfaithful husband, in Jack Clayton’s The Pumpkin Eater (1964), alongside James Mason and Peter Finch. She replaced Patricia Neal in John Ford’s drama 7 Women (1966), when Neal had a stroke. Then came a complete change in direction with The Graduate, a huge critical and commercial success that brought her a further Oscar nomination.
Oddly, after The Graduate she struggled to find roles that matched her earlier achievements, though there were more Oscar nominations for her performances as an ageing ballet dancer in The Turning Point (1977) and in Agnes of God (1985). She played Churchill’s mother in Young Winston (1972), Mary Magdalene in Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and the actress Mrs Kendal in The Elephant Man (1980), but sometimes it seemed as if she were lending a presence rather than creating a character.
On Broadway she had another success with William Gibson’s Golda (1977-78). She wrote and directed the film Fatso (1980), as well as co-starring in it, with Dom DeLuise as a fat man trying to lose weight after the death of his obese cousin. It veered unsurely between comedy and pathos and Bancroft vowed never to direct again. She was not, however, put off comedy and she and Brooks co-starred in a remake of To Be or Not To Be (1983).
Bancroft was excellent as the sophisticated New York collector whose friendship with the bookseller Anthony Hopkins develops through their business correspondence, in the gentle romantic drama 84 Charing Cross Road (1987). It brought her a third British Academy Award. In complete contrast she was a larger-than-life Jewish mama in Torch Song Trilogy (1988).
With good lead roles increasingly difficult to find, she took supporting parts in Malice (1993), How to Make an American Quilt (1995), GI Jane (1997), Great Expectations (1998), as Ms Dinsmoor, and the comedy Keeping the Faith (2000). She also provided the voice of the queen in the animated film Antz (1998).
Bancroft expressed surprise at the iconic status her performance as Mrs Robinson acquired over the years, and lamented how The Miracle Worker had faded from the public consciousness. "I am quite surprised, that with all my work, and some of it is very, very good, that nobody talks about The Miracle Worker," she said in an interview two years ago. "We’re talking about Mrs Robinson . . . I’m just a little dismayed that people aren’t beyond it yet."
She is survived by her husband and their son, Max Brooks, an actor and writer.
Anne Bancroft, actress, was born on September 17, 1931. She died on June 6, 2005, aged 73.
