When Anne Bancroft starred in 'The Graduate' she already had an Oscar and two Tony Awards
But after she was Mrs. Robinson all the producers offered her the same role over and over again. Although Anne Bancroft had already won an Oscar, the world knew her as Mrs. Robinson, Anne Bancroft has delivered memorable performances both on film and on stage, but she remains clung to viewers' memories as a predator of young men, even though she was only six years older than Dustin Hoffman. However, by Hollywood standards, a 30-year-old man may be a young man fresh out of college, but a 36-year-old woman is already a jaded mature woman seeking refuge in younger arms.
Bancroft came to loathe the character of her that elevated her because she was aware that she had overshadowed the rest of her accomplishments, a role for which she was not even her first choice. The producer first thought of Patricia Neal, Geraldine Page, Deborah Kerr, Lana Turner, Susan Hayward, Rita Hayworth, Ingrid Bergman, and even Ava Gardner. The latter was even interviewed by director Mike Nichols, but she turned him down, she no longer wanted to act. It was also rejected by Doris Day, or rather her husband, who found the script "dirty" and didn't even bother to show it to her wife, according to Sam Kasher in a long article on the filming of the classic.
But despite the producer's attempts to cast another actress with more pull, Nichols always had Bancroft in mind; a bit of an odd decision considering she was only six years older than Hoffman and eight years older than the actress playing her daughter Katharine Ross, but eight is an ideal age for motherhood according to Hollywood producers. However, Gene Hackman, who came to record part of the role of Mr. Robinson, was fired because, although he was a year older than Bancroft, he was too young. Time is relative and in Hollywood, more.
But the truth is that even though the actress came to hate the film, after 50 years it is clear that she, with her incredible voice, her deep gaze, and her infinite frustration disguised as libido, anger, and despair, is the true star of the function. In fact, few remember the name of the rest of the characters, but Mrs. Robinson is immortal. Critic Roger Ebert said of her that he was the only person in the film with whom he would like to have a conversation. When he told Bancroft herself, she replied: "Of course, I did, why do you think I accepted the role?"
She was too “ethnic”, she was not believable as a female lead. The first thing Fox did to soften it up changed her name, the young Anna Maria Louisa Italiano becoming Anne Bancroft, a name she chose from a list provided by producer Darryl Zanuck, "Bancroft was the only name that didn't make me sound like a bubble dancer," she said years later. And this is a bubble dancer.
Since she was four years old, she had been clear that hers was her interpretation. Her family supported her but on one condition: if she didn't get a job soon, she would have to leave, the domestic economy was very fragile and they couldn't afford for one of her three daughters not to work. It didn't take long for her to find small roles, but her physique typecast her, she was too serious, too elegant. She was relegated to brides and women condemned to the background. It didn't take long for her to become aware of this: in her first film, Fog in the Soul, she coincided with Marilyn Monroe and no one paid her the slightest attention. She ended up starring in movies that didn't measure up to her immense talent: she did decadent peplums like Demetrius and the Gladiators, played an Indian woman, and even starred in a 3D film The Black Beast co-starring a massive gorilla.
When her contract ended and without having found a space for her yet, Fox did not renew it. But she had confidence in herself and she opted for small independent productions that did not take her anywhere.
She moved to New York, made her Broadway debut in Any Day Any Corner opposite Henry Fonda, and won a Tony Award. She was finally safe from Hollywood and her feminine standards. The following year she played the role of Anna Sullivan in The Miracle of Anna Sullivan and won the second Tony. The play was so successful that it became one of the great projects of Hollywood, it was a story too good to be true, although it was: the life of a deafblind girl isolated from the world who ends up finding a way to express her emotions thanks to the tenacity of a young teacher.
Despite the success that the play had achieved with her, she was not the first choice to play the role, United Artists tried to cast Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn, but both the director Arthur Penn and the screenwriter William Gibson castled, it had to be Bancroft.
They were not mistaken, he won the Oscar for her in a ceremony that is remembered for being one of the most emblematic moments of that ziggurat of hatred that is the rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, as Ryan Murphy deliciously told us in Feud. Knowing that Davis was nominated, Crawford offered to collect the Oscar if any of the other four nominees were not in the room. When Maximilian Schell read the name of Anne Bancroft, who was in New York at the time representing Mother Courage and Her Children, Davis's archenemy Crawford emerged splendidly to collect it and what all the papers ran the next day was her dazzling photo. dressed like a winner and wearing the best of her smiles with the Oscar in hand. A smile that she would not have devoted even to her own statuette because she enjoyed Davis' sadness more for not having gotten her third Oscar than her own joy.
It's hard to think of a more seemingly disparate pairing. Bancroft radiated irresistible appeal and remained associated with "dense" roles, while Brooks was a zany comedian who told fart jokes and, to be kind, let's just say slightly less attractive than she was. But knowing each other is the lightning that Pedro Salinas used to say. They coincided in the recording of a program of The Perry Como Show and he fell madly in love. The director of Young Frankenstein and The Crazy Story of Galaxies yelled at her: “Hey, Anne Bancroft” and she was surprised. “This aggressive voice came out of the dark,” she recalled in an interview with Roger Ebert, “and I thought it must be a combination of Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, and Robert Redford. It turned out to be Mel Brooks, and he never left me from that point on. Thank God." And he didn't literally dump her, even paying a woman who worked on the show to tell him what restaurant she was eating at that night so he "accidentally" bumped into her. She too had fallen head over heels for him. he. Everyone was happy except Brooks's mother who didn't understand why her son was marrying a Catholic Italian instead of a nice Jewish girl. When Mel told her he was going to bring his future wife home to introduce her to him, he replied: "Okay, I'll be in the kitchen with my head in the oven."
It was not the first marriage of either, but it was the definitive one. On the outside, they were very different, but they were really an Italian girl and a Jewish boy in New York, used to dealing with racism, with producers who couldn't place them, and with a demonic character that led them to arguments that could have rivaled those of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? but also a sense of humor that helped them get through the bad times. Nothing explains the union of that strange couple as well as the words that Bancroft said one day to Nathan Lane, star of The Producers, one of Brooks' most famous works: "You know, we're like any other couple. We've had ups and downs, But every time I hear the key in the door, I know the party's about to start." It's hard to better describe marital bliss.
For this reason, the fact that one of the screenwriters of The Graduate was the co-creator with Brooks of Super Agent 86 convinced Bancroft. Her husband was right, she was the one for that role. But what would the price be? That character that he never got rid of got him another Oscar nomination and a fixed place as a fantasy in the minds of thousands of teenagers who dreamed of being seduced by such a woman. The movie became a social phenomenon that cost 3 million dollars and grossed 100, but above all, it generated an immortal archetype and a Simon & Garfunkel song that is like bottled nostalgia. And also a curse: despite the times that the play has been performed on Broadway with actresses with a much more obvious sensuality like Kathleen Turner or Jerry Hall, no one has been able to unseat it; in the viewers' minds she is the only Mrs. Robinson. In addition to her, she granted him the third Oscar nomination, the second of hers had come for I am always alone, another story of infidelity, but in this case, she was the one who suffered it.
She thought that this success would make her a candidate for the best roles, but she was too old and Hollywood had no room for women her age (although at that time she was more or less the same as Scarlett Johansson is today). All the roles that came her way condemned me to be a mature, embittered woman with impossible love affairs and stormy relationships. Despite this, she obtained a relevant role that did not enjoy public favor, such as that of Dr. Cartwright in John Ford's latest film Seven Women, the story of a group of women trapped in the middle of the war between China and Mongolia, a masterpiece that remains one of the director's undiscovered gems. The role that Bancroft plays, a tough woman who rides horses smokes whiskey baby, and faces the world with lapidary sentences, is the one that John Wayne could have played in any other Ford play, although he would not have done it as well.
She also shined in Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue in which she played Jack Lemmon's wife and in her role as a dancer who has sacrificed her personal life for her work in Herbert Ross's Decisive Step. . The interpretive duel that she had with Shirley MacLaine earned them two Oscar nominations, the film obtained a total of 11 and holds, along with The Color Purple, the sad record of being the most nominated film without any Oscar. The fourth nomination came thanks to Agnes de Dios, a drama also of theatrical origin in which a novice gives birth to a child who dies after having been, according to her deranged mind, visited by God. A very disturbing film whose viewing, for some curious reason, was used by some nuns' schools at the time as an extracurricular activity to terrify the girls who did not understand anything of what was happening on the screen.
Although she was highly gifted at comedy, her collaborations with her husband such as the Silent Movie or her version of To Be or Not to Be are not among Brooks' most successful works. But as a producer he also tried to support his career: he was the actress Madge Kendall in The Elephant Man, produced by him (it is difficult to imagine anything further from laughs) and he pursued for years the rights to 84 Charing Cross Road, a role in which his wife was able to shine as the writer who maintains an epistolary relationship with the bookseller played by Anthony Hopkins; thanks to her he won her third Bafta.
In the 1990s, roles for women her age became increasingly rare, and she admitted to accepting small appearances just for the sake of acting." She was the senator who takes Demi Moore to the Seals in the hyperbolically macho, cycled Lt. O'Neil and the scammer mentor of Sigourney Weaver in the hilarious Las Seductress. In 2004 she had to leave the shooting of Spanglish that she shared with Paz Vega after being diagnosed with cancer that she kept secret. All her private life had always been developed away from the paparazzi, both her role as the wife of Mel as the mother of the writer and screenwriter Max Brooks, author of World War Z. She died on June 6, 2005, in New York, surrounded by her family. The lights of Broadway went out in her honor, there always there were roles for her even though she was too "ethnic".
