Anne Bancroft, who won the 1962 best actress Oscar as the teacher of a young Helen Keller in The Miracle Workerbut achieved greater fame as the seductive Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, has died.
She died of uterine cancer on Monday at Mount Sinai Hospital, John Barlow, a spokesman for her husband, Mel Brooks, said yesterday.
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 Graduateovershadowed her other achievements.
Dustin Hoffman delivered the famous line when he realised his girlfriend's mother was coming on to him at her house: "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. Aren't you?" Mike Nichols, who directed The Graduate, called Bancroft a masterful performer.
"Her combination of brains, humour, 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."
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 Workerfollowed. Her other Academy nominations: The Pumpkin Eater(1964); The Graduate(1967); The Turning Point(1977); Agnes of God(1985). She was born September 17th, 1931, in the Bronx to Italian immigrant parents. She recalled scrawling "I want to be an actress" on the back fence of her flat when she was 9.
Live television drama was flourishing in New York in the early 1950s, and Bancroft appeared in 50 shows in two years. "It was the greatest school that one could go to," she said in 1997. "You learn to be concentrated and focused."