The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania); 16 Nov. 1984; pg. 81.
Author: Paul Rosenfield (Los Angeles Times)
“I retire after every film,” she says. But Garbo Talks has lured her back.
Stars aren’t stars by accident. And walking down a street with Anne
Bancroft, one understands why.
It’s not so much the public staring (or lack of it) as it is the walk itself. Bancroft’s husband, Mel Brooks, once said he married her for her walk. It’s a stride — the sexy posture of Mrs. Robinson mixed with Golda Meir’s grit — but it’s also what she brings with her, the kind of emotional weight only a star carries.
The eyes are still so intense that cameramen back off from close-ups. The eyes look at you with complete trust, but ease up on her, or get too personal, or even on the brink of too personal, and she becomes somebody else. In one split second, she can remove a pen from a reporter’s hand, change the subject, and still keep him captivated with an anecdote about Darryl Zanuck.
But try walking her home, and you discover why Bancroft, before she was 30, won an Oscar and a Tony and an Emmy. It’s not that she’s conventionally tough, it’s just that you cannot catch a star.
“I don’t quite fit into this world,” Bancroft said as she sat in a small, empty dining room at her favorite restaurant. “There’s a fragility to me that never quite shows up in my work. I think I’ve always played survivors. I would never be offered the role of Blanche DuBois. But just because one is strong, that doesn’t mean one can’t also be weak.”
Only the night before did she agree to sit still for an interview, because of Garbo Talks, Sidney Lumet’s sweet urban fable about heroine worship that opened to cozy reviews. (The film opens today in Philadelphia.)
Bancroft carries the picture, her 33rd, on her padded shoulders. It’s another case of Anne Bancroft reinventing herself, as she does every five years or so. Since she made the cover of Time magazine 25 years ago, she has hardly again been interviewed, or let the public know her.
“I forget my career, y’know?” she said rhetorically, in the soft nasal voice she uses as the dying mother in Garbo Talks.
“See, when I was at my peak, the peak of my looks, my career, my . . . power . . . I pulled back. I decided to have a child, and I conceived when I was in my 40s. I knew I had to pull back, and it wasn’t for my child. It was for me. I wanted to be with him. I believe you can have both, you can serve two masters . . . But then, I retire after every film.”
But probably not after Garbo Talks.
For the first time on screen, Bancroft ages well beyond her 53 years. “Sidney Lumet had seen me with Mel in To Be or Not to Be last year. And he called me in the Caribbean, where we were vacationing. He said, ‘Annie, I’ve got a part for you but you are too young and beautiful and sexy to play it.’ I said, ‘Sidney, in To Be or Not to Be, I wore lifts, I was photographed very lovingly and I was sleeping with the producer.’
“So Sidney said, ‘Come to New York, but we couldn’t. So he came to California, and I went to see him, and he just stared at me. Finally he said, ‘You’re not so young, you’re not so beautiful, you’re not so sexy . . . and you’ve got the part!'”
And Bancroft said yes. Through the years, she has been offered everything from Fanny Brice (in Funny Girl) to Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) to Joan Crawford (Mommie Dearest). More often than not, she has said no. At career peaks, actresses like Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor chose lives away from Hollywood. Bancroft, conversely, stayed in town, married a complicated funny man against everyone’s odds — and kept getting star offers. It’s the ultimate Hollywood juggle and it almost never works.
Bancroft nodded in agreement. “‘ve had a lot,” she said forthrightly. “Fame, acclaim, work. But you don’t get away without paying a price. And I was willing to pay the price. The price is that you suffer with each work commitment. It’s being out of town and feeling your family won’t survive without you. Of course, they survive nicely without you. It’s me who misses them. They protect me from floating up into the stratosphere. They anchor me. If one has that kind of protection, one can afford to be generous with one’s soul.”
Growing up, Bancroft was Anna Maria Italiano (a.k.a. Ann Marno, Miss Rheingold Beer, Ann St. Raymond, Anne Tulane), who at age 9 already had scrawled “I want to be an actress” on the back wall of a
Bronx flat on St. Raymond Street.
When she was one month shy of graduation at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, then-CBS casting director Robert Fryer announced to a roomful of hopefuls that Miss Anne Italiano had a part, a featured role in Turgenev’s “Torrents of Spring” on Studio One. The next year Italiano went Hollywood, almost accidentally.
“I wasn’t captain of my own ship,” Bancroft admitted. “I only screen-tested at Fox to help someone out. I was going through life doing what one was supposed to do. I was very dumb. How old was I? 18? 19?”
The First Time
She was barely 20, the test was for “The Girl on the Via Flamina,” and Anne Italiano played “a girl having an affair in Italy with a soldier who has to leave . . . I had never had sex, never been in love, never been to Italy, and I didn’t know any American soldiers.” Also, she’d never been in front of a movie camera. What was that first time like?
Bancroft’ answer speaks volumes. “The camera? I didn’t even know it was there. I just wanted to act. Imagination took over.”
She was typed from the start (Don’t Bother to Knock, 1952) as a film noir ingenue, and she played out the ’50s as everything from a gangster’s daughter to an Apache in trouble to a Guatemalan in trouble. Sexual without being overt, Bancroft in one film was the wife of Robert Preston while also sleeping with Victor Mature; when, wearing curlers, she told Mature, “You’re the most wanted man,” the sizzle was real. From the start on the screen, she was a woman.
Film noir ingenues offscreen were never anything close to happy. Off-camera, she was “lonely, scared . . . I think fear disguises itself as pride or depression.” Bancroft was living alone on Sunset Strip and going to too many parties.
“I remember once walking up to a nice-looking woman at a party, and saying, ‘Can I be your friend?’ That woman is still my friend, and she still reminds me of that party, but that’s how unhappy I was. I had no real base. And after six or seven years here, with a failed marriage and a career going downhill . . . my early dream was going away.”
It was the late ’50s and Bancroft left Hollywood for Broadway. When she returned five years later in The Miracle Worker, she won an Academy Award. The Miracle Worker (and her 1958 breakthrough role in Two for the Seesaw) was a product of the triangle of director Arthur Penn, playwright William Gibson and Bancroft.
The move wasn’t brash, and Bancroft didn’t accost producers for jobs. “What I did was, I fixed myself up so that I could do anything acting-wise — and finally I could do anything. But remember, this came only after years of confusion and failure, Nobody takes you by the hand for this kind of move, you just take yourself; it’s very fundamental and personal. Finally, it was Arthur Penn who saw what was there. But, really, my whole career has developed backward.”
Her instincts, however, were not backward. If stardom is about knowing what’s right for oneself, Bancroft — whose next project is to star opposite Jane Fonda as Mother Miriam Ruth in Columbia’s Agnes of God — knew early on. The studio practically announced that she would appear in Funny Girl, but instinct told her to steer clear of the project. And yet she might comfortably have become a musical-comedy star. (Her maiden TV special, Annie, the Woman in the Life of a Man, won an Emmy and showed her off as a sophisticated song-and-dance woman.) Still, she sidestepped Broadway musicals.
Mrs. Robinson
The actress won’t limit herself to a favorite role, but moviegoers would doubtless name Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson, from The Graduate, as one of the best female performances of the ’60s (and since). With director Mike Nichols, Bancroft took a stock character (turned down by both Jeanne Moreau and Doris Day) and spun something pure and new. At 36, Bancroft became a sexy dream woman for a generation of pent-up young men. Her face lights up, complete with the big grin, if you mention Mrs. Robinson.
“I never dug deeper in my life,” she said of her performance, which looked effortless. “It was so educational. I had conceived her as a less calculating woman. But Mike’s theory about it was very clear: All grown-ups were bad and all kids were wonderful. I didn’t see it, but we rehearsed for two weeks and gradually that side of her character emerged. Then I began to see in myself the coldness.”
In Garbo Talks, Bancroft has to do a scene most performers would call either a dream or a nightmare. It’s a five-page monologue, shot in closeup in a hospital bed, that clocks in at seven of the best minutes in recent American films. It’s a monologue that makes you forget it’s a monologue, “and it’s one reason I took the part,” admitted Bancroft.
A scary challenge
“Y’know, with age your memory starts to go, and I thought, ‘Can I remember all this dialogue?,’ because I knew Sidney would want it all in one take, and he did. And I was on the verge of saying no. Then I just began working on it, every morning for maybe a month, until I had it. I would start immediately in the morning, every single day. It’s the longest thing I ever did, even on the stage. I was so terrified, but finally I took myself aside and said, ‘You just have to have the courage to do this.”
Another kind of courage was to reveal age. Bancroft, a swimmer who right up close looks a decade younger than her character in Garbo, explained why audiences are stunned: “I did wear lifts in To Be or Not to Be. And I did use padding and aging makeup for the woman in Garbo. I wanted her heavier, because I like heavy people. Being glamorous is easy; age isn’t.”
Somehow, charmed career or otherwise, Bancroft would seem to be an actress (like Bette Davis) free of age worries. Only she isn’t so sure. “I may now have to face that change, y’know the one,” she said gravely. “The change — when you begin to play other people’s mothers.” Remind her she played Elaine Robinson’s mother 17 years ago, and she seems surprised. “That’s true — and I wasn’t anybody’s mother then. I really do forget my career.”
Garbo Talks 