EGOT achiever. The woman who played Annie Sullivan, Mrs. Robinson, and a dozen characters in between with equal ferocity and intelligence. A Bronx-born actress who became one of the most technically formidable and emotionally brave performers in American theatre and film.
Portrait · Anne Bancroft
Born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano on September 17, 1931, in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of Italian immigrants — her father a garment worker, her mother a homemaker. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Actors Studio, and arrived on Broadway in 1958 with Two for the Seesaw, winning her first Tony Award before her film career had properly started.
The role that changed everything was Annie Sullivan in William Gibson's The Miracle Worker — first on Broadway (1959, Tony Award) and then on film (1962, Academy Award). Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher, required Bancroft to fight a blind, deaf, entirely physically resistant child across multiple brutal scenes without once letting the violence obscure the love underneath it. The water-pump scene is one of cinema's transcendent moments.
Mike Nichols cast her as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967) — a role she played at thirty-five opposite a twenty-nine-year-old Dustin Hoffman, despite being only six years older. The seduction scenes required both performers to be simultaneously predatory and afraid, and Bancroft brought to Mrs. Robinson's restlessness a specificity that transformed what could have been a villain into a tragedy.
She earned five Oscar nominations in total, won two Tonys, an Emmy, and a Grammy — an EGOT achieved quietly, without campaigns or announcements, simply by doing the work at the highest level across every medium that asked her. She died of uterine cancer in 2005, married for forty years to Mel Brooks.
The fight scenes between Bancroft and Patty Duke are some of the most physically demanding sequences in American cinema — and Bancroft never lets the physical spectacle become the point. Underneath every struggle is a teacher who knows that cruelty and love are the same instrument, deployed carefully. The water-pump sequence remains one of cinema's most moving moments.
Mrs. Robinson has been reduced to a cultural shorthand — seductress, predator — but Bancroft plays her as a woman whose choices make a specific kind of tragic sense. Her regret is visible in every scene where she isn't performing seduction. She is the only character in the film who fully understands what is happening, and it is destroying her.
The confrontation scene between Bancroft and MacLaine — two women arguing in a parking lot about the choices they made twenty years ago — is one of Hollywood's great two-hander sequences. Neither woman is wrong. Bancroft plays Emma's triumph as its own kind of loss.
Bancroft's Hanff is warm, funny, combative, and achingly lonely — a woman whose most intimate relationship is conducted entirely through the post. She makes the film's epistolary form feel like the most natural thing in the world. One of the most quietly devastating performances of her career, precisely because it never announces its devastation.
Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
Anne Bancroft's legacy is partly the specific performances — Annie Sullivan's water-pump breakthrough, Mrs. Robinson's studied seduction, Emma's parking-lot reckoning — and partly a quality of intelligence that was visible in every frame she occupied. She was never in a scene without thinking about it, and it showed.
The marriage to Mel Brooks — forty-one years, the most durable partnership in Hollywood — is itself a kind of artistic statement: a woman of fierce dramatic seriousness who chose to spend her life with the man who made Blazing Saddles, and found in that marriage something that the serious work alone couldn't provide. She understood that joy and gravity were not opposites, that Annie Sullivan and Mel Brooks's wife could be the same person, and she lived that understanding for four decades.