Anne Bancroft 1931-2005 Award-winning TV, film and stage star
 Curb Your Enthusiasm appearance with husband Mel Brooks, as themselves. |
Actress Anne Bancroft, whose vast and varied career earned her an Oscar, two Emmys, two Tonys and two Golden Globes, died yesterday in New York City following a bout with cancer. She was 73.
Although she won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Annie Sullivan, the selfless teacher of Helen Keller in the movie version of the hit Broadway play The Miracle Worker (for which she had previously won a Tony), Bancroft will always be remembered as Mrs. Robinson, the middle-aged seductress who initiates an affair with the son of her husband’s law partner, played by Dustin Hoffman, in the 1967 film The Graduate. While proud of her work in the film, Bancroft regretted that her character so penetrated the public consciousness that it overshadowed the rest of her work, which spanned every medium and genre of entertainment.
Born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano on September 17, 1931, in the Bronx, she studied at New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts and began performing in the early years of television as Anne Marno in such series as Studio One and The Adventures of Ellery Queen. In 1952, armed with a contract from 20th Century Fox, she moved to Los Angeles, where, at the studio’s urging, she changed her ethnic-sounding last name to Bancroft from a list supplied by Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck.
After a string of B-movies, Bancroft returned to New York for the 1958 Broadway production of Two on a Seesaw, opposite Henry Fonda. The play, directed by Arthur Penn, earned the actress her first Tony. Her second came two years later for The Miracle Worker, also directed by Penn, whom Bancroft always cited as one of the most profound influences on her career, and co-starring an adolescent Patty Duke as the deaf and blind Helen Keller. When the play made it to the screen two years after that, both Bancroft and Duke won Oscars for their performances.
Over the next 30 years Bancroft moved from films to plays to television projects with ease, picking up four more Oscar nominations—for the Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Graduate (1967), The Turning Point (1977) and Agnes of God (1985)—along the way. Her other memorable films include 84 Charing Cross Road, ’Night Mother and G.I Jane.
For her television work, Bancroft received seven Emmy nominations and won two—for the 1970 variety special Annie, the Woman in the Life of a Man and for the 1999 film Deep in My Heart. Throughout her career she never strayed far from the small screen, appearing in everything from golden-era series like Playhouse 90 and The Alcoa Hour to game shows like Password and What’s My Line? to telefilms and miniseries such as Jesus of Nazareth and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All to popular contemporary comedy series like The Simpsons and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Although Bancroft’s theater work diminished when she became a film star, a highlight of her post-Miracle Worker stage career was her performance as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier in the 1977 Broadway production Golda.
In 1954, early in her Hollywood career, Bancroft married businessman Martin A, May, from whom she was divorced in 1957. In 1964 she married writer-director-producer-actor Mel Brooks, with whom she remained ever since. The two were one of Hollywood and New York’s most beloved show-business couples, and Bancroft collaborated with Brooks on several occasions, making brief appearances in his movies Blazing Saddles, Silent Movie, Dracula: Dead and Loving It and To Be or Not to Be.
In addition to Brooks and their son Max, a writer-producer, Bancroft is survived by her mother, two sisters and a grandson.