In Remembrance: Anne Bancroft

     Anne Bancroft, the Academy Award winning actress best remembered for her role as the middle-aged housewife who attempts to seduce the son of her husband’s law partner in The Graduate (1967), has passed away in New York City on Monday, June 6, 2005. She was 73.

     Born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano on September 17 1931 in the Bronx, New York, Bancroft claimed that she wanted to be an actress since she was a little girl. It was only at her mother’s insistence that she dropped out of college and enrolled at New York’s Academy of Dramatic Arts.

     Although a member of New York’s Actors Studio, she professed an interest in the actual performance of a role over acting theory. She stated that fellow Studio actor Rod Steiger once gave her a copy of Stanislavsky’s writings on acting but that she never read it. Following graduation, she soon found work in a few stage plays as well more than 50 live television productions that originated in the city.

     In 1952, Bancroft signed with 20^th Century Fox, changing her last to Bancroft as “it sounded dignified.” However, the films she found herself in - B grade fare such as the adventure film Treasure Of The Condor (1953) and the 3-D Gorilla At Large (1954) - were not as dignified and she returned to New York City and stage acting.

     Bancroft’s first role returning to the Broadway boards was Two For The Seesaw, which starred Henry Fonda. She would win a Tony award for best supporting actress for her performance of a Bohemian girl from the Bronx who becomes involved with Fonda’s married Midwestern lawyer.

     Bancroft followed that up by starring opposite a ten-year old Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker. Her portrayal of teacher Anne Sullivan struggling to communicate with young Helen Keller earned her a second Tony Award, this time for Best Actress. Bancroft and Duke went to Hollywood to recreate their roles in the 1962 film version of the play, both winning Academy Awards for their performances.

     With two Tony awards and an Oscar win to her credit, Bancroft soon found a better caliber of film roles being offered than she had had during her first tenure in Hollywood. Her next role was as a wife driven to a nervous breakdown by her husband’s infidelity in Harold Pinter’s adaptation of Penelope Mortimer’s novel The Pumpkin Eater (1964). She played another housewife in a crumbling marriage in The Slender Thread (1965).

     But it was her role as the bored housewife Mrs. Robinson who aggressively seduces a young and slightly naive Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate that is most remembered by the public. The image of Bancroft removing a stocking from her leg while a bemused Hoffman intones, “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me… Aren’t you?” has become one of Hollywood’s most enduring film moments. Although Bancroft would earn another Academy Award nomination for her work, she would later become distressed that the sum of her career was often overshadowed by this one role.

     In addition to her Oscar win for The Miracle Worker and nomination for The Graduate, Bancroft also received Academy Award nominations for her roles in The Pumpkin Eater, The Turning Point (1977) and Agnes Of God (1984). She also appeared in such films as The Prisoner Of Second Avenue (1972), The Elephant Man (1980), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), Torch Song Trilogy (1988), Honeymoon In Vegas (1992), G. I. Jane (1997) and Great Expectations (1998). She starred in two films with her second husband, comic Mel Brooks - To Be Or Not To Be (1983) and Dracula: Dead And Loving It (1995).

     Her final role is in the animated film Delgo, due to be released later this year.