Miss Bancroft, who was married for more than 40 years to writer, director and comedian Mel Brooks, died in Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. The cause of death was uterine cancer.
After "The Miracle Worker," Bancroft was nominated for four more Oscars, playing an emotionally tormented wife in "The Pumpkin Eater" (1964), Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate," a ballet dancer who chose her career over a personal life in "The Turning Point" (1977) and a mother superior in "Agnes of God" (1985). She also had great success on the stage, where she won Tony Awards for her work in "Two for the Seesaw" and "The Miracle Worker."
Arthur Penn, who directed her in both of those plays and in the film "The Miracle Worker," told the New York Times: "More happens in her face in 10 seconds than happens in most women's faces in 10 years."
That was certainly the case in "The Graduate," where as the bored wife of a profoundly conventional suburbanite, she boldly seduces Benjamin Braddock, the Hoffman character. The plot grows emotionally hazardous when he later falls in love with her daughter (Katharine Ross). A still photo of Benjamin regarding Mrs. Robinson's leg in a nylon stocking became an icon of movie imagery.
Although much was made of the generation gap, Bancroft was only 36 when the movie was made, and Hoffman was 30. Revisiting the movie in 1997, I realized that it played completely differently for me from the way it had 30 years earlier. Then I had found Mrs. Robinson "magnificently sexy, shrewish and self-possessed enough to make the seduction convincing."
After the 1997 viewing I wrote: "Well, here is to you, Mrs. Robinson: You've survived your defeat at the hands of that insufferable creep, Benjamin, and emerged as the most sympathetic and intelligent character in 'The Graduate.' " I added: "Mrs. Robinson is the only person in the movie who is not playing old tapes. She is bored by a drone of a husband, she drinks too much, she seduces Benjamin not out of lust, but out of kindness or desperation. Makeup and lighting are used to make Anne Bancroft look older. But there is a scene where she is drenched in a rainstorm; we can see her face clearly and without artifice, and she is a great beauty. She is also sardonic, satirical and articulate -- the only person in the movie you would want to have a conversation with."
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