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CURRENT BIOGRAPHY 1960
BANCROFT, ANNE Sept. 17, 1931 - Actress
A newcomer to Broadway, actress Anne Bancroft, of Italian-American background, has scored two hits in succession--first as a Jewish girl in Two for the Seesaw in 1958 and as an American educator in The Miracle Worker in 1959. Her portrayal of Annie Sullivan, the teacher of Helen Keller, won her an ANTA award for the best performance of the 1959-60 season. Miss Bancroft has been called "a female Marlon Brando" and "a young Magnani." Before she made her Broadway debut in Two for the Seesaw she had appearedin some fifteen second-rate movies and about ninety television shows.
Anne Bancroft, whose real name is Anne-marie (some sources give Anna Maria) Italiano, was born on September 17, 1931 in the Bronx, New York, to Michael and Mildred (DiNapoli) Italiano. Her father was a dress pattern maker and her mother, a telephone operator at Macey's department store. She has two sisters, Jo Anne and Phyllis. It was Mrs. Italiano who decided that of her three daughters Anne would be the actress. Anne admits she was a born show-off. When she was three or four years old she sang for WPA workers on the streets of the East Bronx. "I was the personality kid," she told a Time interviewer (December 21, 1959). "When I wasn't sick, I was singing."
After Public School Number 35, Anne entered Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, where she was active in the drama club and a member of Arista. In her senior year, in 1947, she decided to become a laboratory technician instead of an actress, but her mother scraped up the tuition to send her to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Her first professional performance was on television in the Studio One production of Ivan Turgenev's Torrents of Spring. Using the name of Anne Marno, she had a role in the TV series The Goldbergs and appeared occasionally on such programs as Danger, Suspense, and Studio One, on which Fred Coe first saw her act. In this period she also worked in drug stores and taught english to Peruvian singer Yma Sumac.
After a screen test, Anne immediately won a Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation contract. Choosing the name of Anne Bancroft from a list submitted to her by Darryl F. Zanuck, then head of production at Fox, she appeared in a featured role in Don't Bother to Knock (1952). She portrayed the wife of S. Hurok in Tonight We Sing (1953), a film biography of the impressario; a Roman lady in Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), a spectacle about early Christianity; the gangster's unhappy daughter in New York Confidential (1955), a drama about syndicated crime; and the blonde wife of the colonel in The Last Frontier (1956), a western.
After two years under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox and five years of free-lancing, Miss Bancroft took inventory of herself. "Not only had I arrived," she told interviewer Stanley Richards (Theatre, December 1959), "but there was a great deal of work and study ahead. . . . I learned a great deal in Hollywood, even though I'm not particularly proud of the fifteen films I made."
After reading the script for Two for the Seesaw she yearned for the part of Gittel Mosca, a ballet dancer who has exchanged the Bronx for Bohemia. When she met Fred Coe, the play's producer, she decided to impress him not so much by acting the role of Gittel as by making herself over as Gittel. "I made sure he found me with one shoe off, scratching my foot," she told an interviewer from Time. She succeeded. Coe, Arthur Penn, the director, and William Gibson, the playwright, agreed that she was a perfect choice for the Bohemian girl in the two-character play about an affair between an Omaha lawyer on the brink of divorce and a generous Greenwich Village stray.
At rehearsals Anne Bancroft demonstrated that she could learn to take direction admirably. "At first," Arthur Penn informed a Time reporter, "she could hardly find the stage . She'd play with her back to the audience. She was too broad and too vulgar. Even the lawyers and agents connected with the show said, 'She's no good; dump her.' I even had to tell her where the jokes were, but once was enough."
Playing opposite the veteran actor Henry Fonda, Miss Bancroft won immediate recognition as an acomplished actress when the play opened on Broadway on January 16, 1958. As the black-stockinged beatnik in search of self-respect, "Miss Bancroft ... turns out to be a deliriously captivating comic, a rich discovery, a youngster who should do much for the West 40's," wrote Frank Aston in the New York World-Telegram and Sun (January 17, 1958). She won the Antoinette Perry, Theatre World; and Variety awards for her performance.
When Gibson, Penn, and Coe turned to their second enterprise, The Miracle Worker, they never questioned that the fourth member of their team, Anne Bancroft, would play the role of Annie Sullivan. In the play the governess at first takes on the job of merely taming the spoiled and savage child, Helen Keller. Soon she dedicates herself to opening the entire universe by means of language to Helen, who is triply handicapped by blindness, muteness, and deafness.
To groom herself for her demanding role, Anne Bancroft observed blind and disturbed children at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in New York City. "I became so completely absorbed that I stayed three weeks to work with them," Miss Bancroft told Stanley Richards. In order to know what it was like to be blind, she attached adhesive strips to her eyelids and wore dark glasses for two days. Then she visited the Vacation Camp for the Blind to practice the manual alphabet she had learned. Soon Miss Bancroft and Patty Duke, who had been assigned the role of young Helen Keller, were carrying on private conversations and cracking jokes in the manual alphabet.
The play opened on October 19, 1959 at the Playhouse Theatre, and both Miss Bancroft and Patty Duke received unanimous critical praise. Anne's picture appeared on the covers of numerous magazines. "Miss Bancroft has an amazing talent for onstage concentration and a willingness to work disciplinedly and hard," noted Henry Hewes (Saturday Review, November 7, 1959). "She has an extraordinary spontaneity which makes it all seem 'natural.'"
Despite shoulder, knee, and shin pades, both actresses have been injured in the nightly pummeling they give each other in a scene based on an accual "battle royal" described in one of Annie Sullivan's letters. "Since Miss Bancroft and Patty Duke are inventive," reported Nan Robertson (New York Times, December 20, 1959), "the scene is never played exactly the same way twice ... It is invariably followed by amazed applause. Depending on the audience, the scene may be played for laughs, tears, or tension ... on occasion, it has been hilarious. Annie is a natural clown."
Anne Bancroft is happiest and most satisfied when she is working. She has no objection to television or film assignments, but for her a live audience is the most exiting. Twice a week she studies at the Actors Studio, where she is concentrating on Shakespearean and Restoration roles. She is also taking voice lessons because she wants to appear in a Broadway musical.
Standing five feet six inches in height and weighing about 120 pounds, Anne Bancroft has a round face, a mobile mouth, brown eyes, and brown hair. Among her favorite clothes are black cotton stockings, flat shoes, and shapeless sweaters. She makes her home in an apartment in a remodeled Greenwich Village brownstone, where she likes to read biography and paint in water colors. She is currently undergoing psychoanalysis. Her marriage to Martin A. May on July 4, 1954 ended in divorce on February 13, 1958. Of the $150,000 she earns a year she reserves $50 a week for spending money, investing a large part of the rest of her funds in Manhattan real estatem a California bank, and a Texas oil well.
She still works with blind children. When one little boy learned how to load his spoon with food, she wept at "one of the most wonderful sights she had ever seen." She told Richard Harrity (Cosmopolitan February 1960) that in getting to know the blind children and their teachers, she has a compulsion to help. When Harrity asked her about her future plans, she said: "I want to do everything, and while that may sound greedy it really isn't. I feel that if you limit your hopes, you limit your horizons."
Her hunger for experience transcends the limits of her daily life. She told Gilbert Millstein of the New York Times Magazine (February 9, 1958): "I like to be alone when I want to be alone; I like to be with people when I like to be with people; walk when I want to walk, take baths when I want to take baths, sleep when I'm sleepy. I would like the right to die. Life is here only to be lived so that we can, through life, earn the right to death, which to me is paradise, really. . . . Paradise to me is knowledge, the answers to all the questions you think of and all the questions you never think of in life."
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