Chicago Tribune (Chicago, Illinois); 4 Apr. 1993; pg. 76.
Author: Michael J. Bandler
Anne Bancroft yearns to be back on the seesaw. “That’s the part l’d want to play again,” she said recently, referring to Gittel Mosca, the ingenuous, black-stockinged, bohemian heroine of Two For the Seesaw, the two-character play that marked Bancroft’s Broadway debut Jan. 16, 1958.
“I like women with struggles and with complications,” she said. “They don’t always have to overcome those struggles and complications, but in theater and in movies most of the time they do—that’s what’s written. They’re always heroic—but they don’t have to be.”
A role like Gittel, and the chance to co-star with Henry Fonda, is a rare opportunity. But so was Helen Keller’s Miracle Worker—teacher Anne Sullivan—or the legendary Mrs. Robinson role in The Graduate, other classic Bancroft portrayals.
“Look, the proof is in the pudding—here I am, she said bluntly about her career as she sat in the production office of her husband, writer director Mel Brooks, on the 20th Century-Fox lot, a few miles from their Santa Monica, Calif. home.
“You see what my work is now she continued. “All of those early days are the building blocks that made me what I am today.”
Because of her career-long penchant for choosing projects carefully (Funny Girl on stage and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on the screen were hers for the asking, but she passed on them), the actress, now 61, has appeared most recently in supporting roles—even cameos (Honeymoon in Vegas).
“I’ve always done what I’ve been attracted to, and turned down the things I never felt needed me,” she said. “It happened to come out that lately the parts are smaller. It wasn’t calculated at all. When a part really needs me and calls me and says, ‘You must do me,’ I say, ‘Oh, well, of course I can’t resist.’ Then I do it.”
The recently opened Point of No Return is Hollywood’s version of the French thriller La Femme Nikita, a case study of the training of a woman assassin. Bancroft plays the instructor who gives the scruffy character played by Bridget Fonda a touch of class. In Mr. Jones, a romantic thriller scheduled to open in the fall that stars Richard Gere and Lena Olin, she plays a psychiatrist.
Last spring, she drew acclaim for her performance in the public television drama Mrs. Cage, in which she played a suburban housewife who murders another shopper in a parking lot. In the course of a police interrogation, this seemingly inexplicable act becomes painfully understandable, as layers of the killer’s psyche are peeled away.
Before her milestone stage and screen roles, even before her work as a contract player on the same lot where she now chatted, before studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck gave her a list of screen names to choose from (“Anne Bancroft was the only one that didn’t sound like a stripper,” she has said), Bancroft was Bronx-born Anna Maria Italiano.
From her earliest years, she was an irrepressible performer. “The [Works Progress Administration] workers would be on the street corner, and I’d go up to them and say, ‘Wanna hear me sing?’ They would say, ‘Sure,’ and take a little break.
Her mother, Mildred, a Macy’s department store telephone operator, envisioned her daughter as an actress. Her father, Michael, who made dress patterns in New York’s Garment District, “just went along with my mother’s dreams,” Bancroft recalled.
Anna Maria might have pursued a career in science, but when her mother had saved enough money, the teenager was enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts shortly after graduating high school.
Beginning her professional career on television appearing in a Studio One production of Ivan Turgenev’s “The Torrents of Spring” in the early 1950s, Bancroft soon gained a Fox movie screen test and contract. She spent two years at the studio appearing in various movie dramas, then freelanced in Hollywood for the next five years. Returning to New York to find better opportunities, she auditioned for William Gibson’s’ Two for the Seesaw. She won the part and a Tony Award for her performance. Fewer than two years later, in 1959, she was back on Broadway in The Miracle Worker, which brought
another Tony—and in 1963 an Oscar for Best Actress.
Except for a few appearances on the stage—including portrayals of Mother Courage and Golda Meir—virtually all of her acting these past three decades has been in movies. Across the years, she agrees, no character in her repertoire—not even Anne Sullivan—has matched the popularity of Mrs. Robinson, the older woman who seduces the youthful Dustin Hoffman in Mike Nichols’ 1967 film, The Graduate.
“It goes to show you that nobody seems to think twice when men in their 60s make love to women in their 20s on the screen, but when an older woman, in her 40s, makes love to somebody in his 20s, it becomes this infamous, memorable character,” she said, laughing.
When she first read the script, she said, “I had no idea the movie was going to be a success, let alone this classic. But I knew that it was going to be something quite special. I’ll tell you, though, there were friends who said, ‘Oh. it’s awful—turn it down!’ They just didn’t get it. I did.
Bancroft says she takes responsibility for her decisions.
“I’ve made my choices, and I’ve paid the prices of those choices. I made the choice not to do certain things, and to do others, and therefore my life and my career have evolved in a certain way. And I don’t regret a minute of it. Not a minute of it! There’s only one thing in life I regret—and that’s that I didn’t have another child.”
Anne and Mel’s son, Max, 20, is college student “out here” (she declines to identify his school or provide any more information). She is candid about the pangs of separation from her son. “I think I’m in worse shape in life than I am in the business—it’s a bad time, it really is. I’m far more frustrated about that than about parts I’m going to get.”
Bancroft and Brooks, who have been married for nearly 30 years, often have seemed to be the original “odd couple.” When they first were dating, the actress recalled, “a famous director said he didn’t give it three weeks. But I don’t think he quite understood what there was that we saw and felt in each other.”
They met at a rehearsal of Perry Como’s television variety show. Bancroft, who had been married briefly once before, was speaking with another guest, and from across the room, “this whippersnapper yelled, ‘Hey, Anne Bancroft, I’m Mel Brooks.’
“I had no idea who he was, but the idea of someone saying that to me—since everyone at that time was quite intimidated by me because I’d just had these two tremendous hits on Broadway- was fascinating. He looked like my father, and his aggressiveness was a great deal like my mother, so I thought, ‘Wow, this is perfect for
me.”
The actress was about to go to her agent’s office. Brooks tagged along, claiming the man was his agent too, “By the time we got there, I wanted Mel so badly to be in my life forever. I knew it. So I told him the story of my life, and then I acted out The Miracle
Worker—the entire play—because he hadn’t seen it. I fascinated him as much as he fascinated me. So we sort of knew that we both wanted to be with each other.
“At that time I was in psychotherapy. I went right to my analyst and said, ‘I have met the man I am going to spend the rest of my life with, so please hurry this process up. I want to be and whole and wonderful and healthy for him.’
“It was absolute fate—we were just meant to be. I can’t say that the entire marriage has been as good as those moments when we first met—but what keeps it pasted together is that we really agree about the most basic things in life.”
They each respect what the other holds dear, she said. “He’s Jewish, I’m Catholic. For some unknown reason, it was very important for me to baptize my son. He knew it was; he had a deep understanding of it; he allowed it. There was no struggle—I’m going to win, you’re going to win. We don’t get into those kinds of power struggles.”
They keep their work separate, she said. (They’ve only appeared together in one movie, To Be or Not to Be and Bancroft had a cameo in Silent Movie.)
“I have no input into his work and he has no input into mine. I say, ‘How are things at the office today, dear?’ He says, ‘Fine,’ and I say, ‘Good.’ Sometimes we’ll be out to dinner with friends, and I’ll find out something very important because he’s telling it to someone else.”
Over the years, more often than not, Bancroft has played solid, independent women. “They see me as this strong, intelligent woman, and they think that I am the person that I play in these movies—and I’m not that, she said, “I can be, but I’m not.”
When she was yearning for a change, she said, she told her agent: “‘You’ve got to find me a part where I am a drunk.’ I wanted to be the most dependent person you could imagine. The part came along: Later this year she will be seen as Nicole Kidman’s drunken mother in Malice.
Bancroft tends to be philosophical about the flow of work in her direction these days.
“Can you think of one period of time when there were parts for older women? I don’t see that there was a period when there were leading roles for Joan Crawford when she was over 60—or even Bette Davis.
“There have always been great roles for men. But there have been great roles for men in real life, and not for women. So I think the art has reflected the life. And when you talk about roles for women in movies, how many women have won a Nobel Prize? See, I think the world has got to change before parts in movies for women are going to change.”
Given those realities, would she encourage a young Anna Maria to give the profession a shot today?
“Sure. Why not? Absolutely. It’s as good as any other business. No matter what you do in your life, you’re going to have problems, you’re going to have sadness, you’re going to have struggles and grief and strife. So you might as well do something where when you’re rewarded, you’re rewarded on the same level as the strife.”
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