NEW YORK - Anne Bancroft, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Helen Keller's teacher in 1962's The Miracle Worker, but cleared a place for herself in pop-culture history five years later as the alluring, embittered Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, has died. She was 73.
She died of cancer Monday at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, John Barlow, a spokesman for her husband, writer-director- comedian Mel Brooks, said yesterday.
Throughout a career that spanned the last half of the 20th century, Ms. Bancroft won respect from both her peers and the public as one of the most versatile and resourceful actors of her generation.
She excelled in both drama and comedy and her resume is testament to a spirited talent that was up for anything, whether it was playing Golda Meir on stage, camping up in her husband's wacky comedies, including Silent Movie (1976) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1996) or providing the voice of insect royalty in the digitally animated comedy, Antz in 1998.
Ms. Bancroft was born Sept. 17, 1931, in the Bronx, the daughter of Italian immigrants. She had wanted to act since she was 9 years old. Her father derided her ambitions, saying, "Who are we to dream these dreams?"
Her mother was the dreamer, encouraging her daughter in 1958 to enroll at the American Academy for Dramatic Arts.
Live television drama was flourishing in New York in the early 1950s, and Ms. 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."
With her dark, sultry beauty, the young woman born Anna Maria Louise Italiano, seemed destined for a conventionally glamorous Tinseltown niche. Her first movie role was second banana to Marilyn Monroe in the comedy, Don't Bother To Knock (1952).
After a string of ingenue parts in movies with titles like Treasure of the Golden Condor (1953) and Gorilla at Large (1954), she returned to New York and enjoyed her first stage coup in 1958 opposite Henry Fonda in Two for the Seesaw, for which she won a Tony.
She won another Tony two years later for her performance in The Miracle Worker as Annie Sullivan, the mercurial, passionate woman hired by Helen Keller's family to teach their deaf and blind daughter, played on stage and screen by Patty Duke. The play's popular, critically acclaimed transformation into a movie signaled a triumphant jump-start to Ms. Bancroft's film career.
