Friday, May 9, 2008
Thirty-four years after creating the indelible Mrs. Robinson, she's an actress who still shines in every role.
Sep 18, 2001 | Although PBS's Charlie Rose is frequently so engaged in his interviews that he consumes more airtime than his guests do, it isn't often that he's reduced to an hour of schoolboy giggles, capped off by proclaiming, "I'm mad for you!" The woman who makes Charlie's knees shake? Anne Bancroft, the thinking man's fantasy, and the kind of woman thinking women want to be. Bancroft is on fire with ideas, brimming with passions, supremely confident and self-aware, without taking herself too seriously or pretending to have all the answers. She turned 70 on Sept. 17, and she still has a body that's ballerina graceful, eyes that reveal the truth (a poker player she is not) and a voice that seems to say, "I'm not gonna take any bullshit," even as "Why, thank you, Sweetheart" leaves her mouth.
In everything she does -- the roles she chooses and the ones she passes by, the image she maintains and the ones she rejects, the hours she works and the ones she spends fishing with her husband (how's that for an image?) -- Bancroft is uniquely herself.
She was born Anna Maria Italiano in the Bronx in 1931, a performer from the start, entertaining aunts, uncles and cousins at frequent family get-togethers; trolling for workmen on her neighborhood streets; and impressing her teachers and fellow students in grammar school. Bancroft's parents, always supportive of her passion for performing, paid the tuition for her schooling at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, which she attended after high school. It was near the end of her time at the AADA that she was seen rehearsing alone on the stage during her lunch hour ("I had no money for malteds and no dates. What the hell was there for me to do but stay onstage when the other kids were out?" she would later explain to Time) and was asked to audition for "Studio One," a popular dramatic television series. She did, and landed her first professional role, which was soon followed by other television performances.
Bancroft grabbed the attention of 20th Century Fox in 1951, when she read opposite another actor in a screen test for the studio. The actor who was being screen-tested didn't get anything out of the arrangement, but Bancroft was signed by Fox and headed out to Hollywood, where she would play mostly supporting parts -- in such roles as a lounge singer, a trapeze artist and a gangster's daughter -- in a string of low-budget pictures. She later told Time, "The studios wanted to give me the Monroe-type sex buildup. I wanted to develop my acting, not my body." And Hollywood publicity shots of Bancroft from that period reveal exactly that. She's a girl you wouldn't recognize -- polished, coiffed and made up to look like someone she hasn't been, on-screen or off, since. (And not because she hasn't played sexy roles, but because the studios didn't recognize then that there was more to her than her looks.) In her photo, there's a gaze of uncertainty we're not accustomed to seeing in Bancroft's eyes -- in her strapless dress and choker, she looks like a girl playing dress-up, trying to convince herself it's real.
The chance she was looking for to prove herself as a serious actress came along in the form of a Broadway play called "Two for the Seesaw." As Gittel Mosca, a Jewish, bohemian dancer from the Bronx, Bancroft starred opposite Henry Fonda and went on to win a Tony for her performance in 1958. She followed up "Seesaw" with the part of Annie Sullivan in "The Miracle Worker," for which she won her second Tony.
Although her work in "Two for the Seesaw" had been critically acclaimed, there were those who weren't yet convinced that Bancroft was doing much more than playing herself. Her portrayal of the half-blind, Irish-American Annie Sullivan immediately dispelled any of those doubts. Upon seeing the play, author Edwin O'Connor said, "This is the most astonishingly accurate Irish accent I've ever heard. It sounds as if she'd been born in Galway."
Get Salon in your mailbox!