Celebrated actress Anne Bancroft, Oscar winner, dies of cancer at 73
NEW YORK – Anne Bancroft, who won the 1962 best actress Oscar as the teacher of a young Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker” but achieved greater fame as the seductive Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate,” has died. She was 73.
She died of uterine cancer on Monday at Mount Sinai Hospital, John Barlow, a spokesman for her husband, Mel Brooks, said Tuesday.
Bancroft was awarded the Tony for creating the role on Broadway of poor-sighted Annie Sullivan, the teacher of the deaf and blind Keller. She repeated her portrayal in the film version.
Yet despite her Academy Award and four other nominations, “The Graduate” overshadowed her other achievements.
Dustin Hoffman delivered the famous line when he realized his girl-friend’s mother was coming on to him at her house: “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me. Aren’t you?”
Bancroft complained to a 2003 interviewer: “I am quite surprised that with all my work, and some of it is very, very good, that nobody talks about ‘The Miracle Worker.’ We’re talking about Mrs. Robinson. I understand the world. … I’m just a little dismayed that people aren’t beyond it yet.”
Mike Nichols, who directed “The Graduate,” called Bancroft a masterful performer.
“Her combination of brains, humor, frankness and sense were unlike any other artist,” Nichols said in a statement. “Her beauty was constantly shifting with her roles, and because she was a consummate actress she changed radically for every part.”
Patty Duke, who played Keller to Bancroft’s Sullivan, said “there aren’t superlatives enough” to describe what working with Bancroft was like. “On most nights we performed it felt as if we were one,” she said.
Bancroft’s beginnings in Hollywood were unimpressive. She was signed by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1952 and given the glamour treatment. She had been acting in television as Anne Marno (her real name: Anna Maria Louise Italiano), but it sounded too ethnic for movies. The studio gave her a choice of names; she picked Bancroft “because it sounded dignified.”
After a series of B pictures, she escaped to Broadway in 1958 and won her first Tony opposite Henry Fonda in “Two for the Seesaw.” The stage and movie versions of “The Miracle Worker” followed. Her other Academy nominations: “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964); “The Graduate” (1967); “The Turning Point” (1977); “Agnes of God” (1985).
Bancroft became known for her willingness to assume a variety of portrayals. She appeared as Winston Churchill’s American mother in TV’s “Young Winston”; as Golda Meir in “Golda” onstage; a gypsy woman in the film “Love Potion No. 9”; and a centenarian for the TV version of “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.”