Anne Bancroft

In the 1977 film "The Turning Point," which brought Bancroft her fourth Oscar nomination (out of five to date), she plays the anything-but-ordinary Emma Jacklin, an aging ballerina who has passed her prime and is forced to comprehend the incomprehensible: that she is no longer the star, that there are other, younger dancers who can and will replace her. While Emma has spent the past 20 years putting her career above everything else, her good friend Deedee Rogers (Shirley MacLaine), once also a dancer, has left the company, married and had a family.

Bancroft was given the choice between the two roles. While in the running for the Oscar (Diane Keaton would win that year for "Annie Hall"), she explained to People magazine her decision to play Emma: "I identified with both women. But Emma had a stronger message for the women I want to speak to now -- women who work. I wanted to tell them that choosing to work doesn't make them oddballs and isn't antisocial." Emma is, on the surface, the antithesis of Mrs. Robinson -- a woman who has pursued her passion to the exclusion of any semblance of a conventional life. When Deedee asks her what her life is like, what it's like to be Emma Jacklin, she responds, "I dance. I take class, I rehearse, I perform. I go home to my hotel. Some cities are better than others. So are some nights." And you can't help but wonder if, in the end, Emma isn't every bit as alone as Mrs. Robinson is, despite the difference of her decision.

Bancroft herself has managed to have both a strong career and a fulfilling personal life. Married to Mel Brooks since 1964, she chose to stay home with their son as he was growing up, instead of building her career with the same intensity she had in the past. Of course, intensity is relative. She continued to work, although less frequently, throughout the '70s and '80s -- writing, directing and costarring in the film "Fatso" in 1980; playing opposite Brooks in his 1983 musical comedy "To Be or Not to Be" (the opening song-and-dance routine where Brooks and Bancroft sing "Sweet Georgia Brown" in Polish is itself worth a trip to the video store); and starring opposite Jane Fonda and Meg Tilly as the irascible Mother Miriam Ruth in 1985's "Agnes of God" (yet another Oscar-nominated performance for Bancroft).

In the past decade, she has become the actress people go to when they want a woman over 60 who's still got it, shining in such films as "Home for the Holidays" (1995), "How to Make an American Quilt" (1995), "G.I. Jane" (1997), "Great Expectations" (1998), "Up at the Villa" (2000) and "Keeping the Faith" (2000).

One of Bancroft's best films, perhaps, is a quiet little sleeper called "84 Charing Cross Road" (1986), based on the memoir by writer Helene Hanff. Playing Hanff, Bancroft is joined by Anthony Hopkins, as London bookseller Frank Doel; Judi Dench, as Frank's wife; and Mercedes Ruehl, as Helene's good friend. Light on plot and heavy with character, "84 Charing Cross" traces the 20-year correspondence between a brash, Jewish, New York writer and a quiet, reserved, British bookseller. Their friendship begins in the fall of 1949, when Hanff writes to the firm for which Doel works, requesting a particular used book she's been unable to track down in New York, and it lasts until Doel's death in December 1968. Because Hanff's plans for a trip to London never work out while Doel is alive, the entire friendship is based on letters -- fitting for a story about two lovers of the written word.

Despite the excellent supporting cast, most of what we see is Hanff on her own -- hammering her letters into her typewriter; shopping at the corner market; buying stamps at the post office and pounding them onto an envelope with her fist; wandering through Central Park; babysitting the infant daughter of a couple she knows (and reading John Henry Newman's "The Idea of a University" to her); standing in a crowd in front of a store window, watching the Brooklyn Dodgers play the Yankees in the Series. In the hands of anyone else, this could put even the most ardent book lover to sleep. But Bancroft brings to the film a depth and substance that enriches the letters themselves. The expressions on her face, the look in her eyes, help us read between the lines, into the story of Hanff's life that isn't told in the letters. When she writes to Doel, "You know, Frankie, you're the only soul alive who understands me," Bancroft is speaking, in a way, for many of the characters she's played over her 50-year career -- people who aren't understood, who are just a bit off-center.

Sometimes described by critics as giving performances that are over the top, in "84 Charing Cross" Bancroft's bold eccentricity and near-neurosis -- masking a certain gravity and introspection just under the surface -- are exactly what's called for. She's the perfect foil to Hopkins' stiff-upper-lip, God-save-the-Queen Brit. More than most of her recent performances (where she's played smaller roles in bigger films), her work in "84 Charing Cross" underscores the qualities that set Bancroft apart: a level of comfort with who she is and what she's about, and to hell with the rest of the world. As she told The New York Times while starring on Broadway in "Two for the Seesaw," at the age of 26, "I was at a point where I was ready to say I am what I am because of what I am and if you like me I'm grateful, and if you don't, what am I going to do about it?"

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