Anne Bancroft won the best actress Oscar for her performance as a blind girl’s
teacher in The Miracle Worker and was nominated for the award on four
other occasions. She relished serious issues and heavyweight drama on both
stage and screen, but it was with the role of Mrs Robinson, the sexually
frustrated housewife who makes a pass at nervous, young Dustin Hoffman in The
Graduate, that Bancroft made an indelible mark on a generation of
film-goers and young men.
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.
