Magazine: Films in Review
Date: January 1980
Article: The Odyssey of Ruby Pepper
By: James Robert Haspiel
"Life is here only to be lived so that we can, through life, earn the
right to death, which to me is paradise. Whatever it is that will bring me the
reward of paradise, I'll do the best I can." The owner of that '58 quote was
once quite literally cinema's Queen of the 'B's. Prior to her memorable
success in The Miracle Worker, Anne Bancroft was the less-than-memorable
star of numerous forgettable features: "I played Sol Hurok's wife, and I played
some kind of a princess, and then I played a couple of Indian roles and lots of
ganster's relatives!" Talking with Bancroft is disarming; despite her powerful
screen persona, in-the-flesh she can be something of a fragile butterfly.
"My real name is Anna Maria Louise Italiano." She was born Sept. 17,
'31, in an apartment on St. Raymond Street, near the corner of Seddon Street
and Maclay Avenue in the Bronx, New York, to Mildred (DiNapoli) and Michael
Italiano. "It was your typical Italian Catholic family. I had thirty-three
first cousins." Her mother recollected: "Anne was always an actress; when she
was three years old she'd run into the street where the WPA workers were
digging and sing for them." Anne recalls, "I still remember Whitey, he had
blond hair. I was in love with Whitey. I think I used to sing because he was
there."
A larger audience awaited her at P.S. 12: "I was the Mamma Bear in
The Three Little Bears. They couldn't afford masks, so they cut holes
in paper bags and put them over our heads. Nobody saw my face." Something
told six-year-old Anne anonymity was counterproductive to her yet undefined
career goals: "At family picnics there'd be about a hundred of us, and who was
always on top of a table singing,dancing, drawing a crowd? Me, I needed
it. My sisters, Jo Anne and Phyllis, had just as much talent as I had, but
they didn't feel my need. Acting-- it's this early need."
At Christopher Columbus High School she assumed the name "Anne Tulane"
for a stage role in Curse You, Jack Dalton. And again, romantic
inclination propelled her further towards the world of acting: "I think I
might have become a Salk instead of an actress if it hadn't been for Jay Okin;
a tall, handsome, wanted-by-everybody boy and -- oh, it pains me to tell you
this -- that boy was showing interest in me. He said he was going to the
American Academy of Dramatic Arts in the Fall. That had alot to do with my
telling my mother I wanted to go there, too." Mildred enrolled daughter Anne
in New York's AADA in '48. "The irony was that Jay didn't go to the Academy.
I never saw him again."
At this juncture Anne worked as a Girl Scout Headquarters receptionist
for $5-a-week, appeared in an amatuer production of Night Must Fall, and
spent Saturday morning traveling to Peekskill, New York to play roles in
"dramtic skits" at a local radio station presenting the Radcliffe Radio
Players -- for which the "Anne Tulane" of CC High now became "Anne St.
Raymond." Our heroine's career ambitions crystalized in '50 when the AADA's
Frances Fuller happened upon Anne in the midst of rehearsing solo on a lunch
break: "It was a scene from a play called Fly Away Home." Fuller told
her husband, producer-director Worthington Miner about the "talented, intense
girl." Anne was invited to audition for Minor's Studio One television
program. "Robert Fryer was the casting director and I read for him -- he sent
me in to read for Worthington Miner. Six girls were trying out and Fryer came
out and said, 'I'm sorry girls, Miss Italiano has the part.'"
Program listings of Apr. 17, '50 advised tele-viewers that that
evening's play on CBS' Studio One would be a 1-hour live production of
Ivan Turgenev's The Torrents of Spring, starring "John Baragrey, Marion
Scanlon, Ann Italiono and Kurt Katch." Two weeks after protraying Gemma,
Turgenev's "peasant girl," Anne graduated from the AADA.
Calling herself "Anne Marno," over the next sixteen months she played
a "record 49 dramatic roles" on live hour-long tv programs:"I did almost every
show there was on CBS. Danger, Suspense, Studio One. I had a running
part on The Goldbergs." In addition to tv chores, Anne "peddled
chocolate-covered cherries in drugstores" and taught English to Peruvian singer
Yma Sumac. But she was a long way from Oscar competitions circa '50: "On the
third tv show I did, Rod Steiger told me about Stanislavsky. I said 'Who's he?'
Rod gave me Stanislavsky's book about acting, An Actor Prepares." (In
'59, Bancroft said, "I still have it, but I've never read it.")
Anne's varied professional activities did not preclude the ever
inspiring subject of love: she accepted an engagement ring from blond actor
John Ericson in what may well have been the literal fulfillment of her
childhood crush on WPA worker "Whitey." Successful in television, Anne
pondered the allure of motion picture stardom: "In newsreels I'd watch stars
arriving at Hollywood premiers and that's what I thought acting was!"
Summertime '51: a fellow actor named Doug Rogers approached Anne about
assisting him in a screen test: "I did a part in The Girl on the Via
Flaminia directed by Frank Gregory. 20th Century-Fox on the East Coast and
the West Coast said well, we'd like to sign that girl." The signing took place
October 12, '51, outdoors on New York City's Fifth Avenue, Anne affixing her
her signature to the all-important document while leaning against the plate
glass window of a "swank department store." Like Jay Okin before him, Anne
never saw Flaminia tes co-star Doug Rogers again.
"When I went to Hollywood on November 21, I was still Anne Marno of
television. Darryl Zanuck thought I ought to change my name because Marno and
my face would type me. He gave me a list of names. They sounded like
strippers' names. Bancroft was the only one with any dignity--or that did not
sound like I should look like Lana Turner, so I took it."
The newly christened Anne Bancroft made her cinema debut in '52, playing
hotel-lounge-thrush Lyn Lesley in Don't Bother to Knock (her singing
dubbed by Eve Marlee), opposite Richard Widmark and "another newcomer, Marilyn
Monroe; I worked with her. It was the most remarkable experience! Because it
was one of those very rare times, in all my experiences in Hollywood, when I
felt that give-and-take that can only happen when your working with good
actors." Bancroft elaborated: "Marilyn played the part of a baby sitter who
has done some very destructive things to this child, and everyone in this
hotel had become aware of it. It was a scene where they were bringing her
down to the lobby to be held for the police. I was just somebody in the
lobby; and I was to walk over to her and react, that's all; and there was to
be a close-up of her and a close-up of me--you know, to show my reaction.
Well, I moved toward her, and I saw that girl-- of course, she wasn't the big
sex symbol she later became, and wasn't famous, so there was nothing I had to
forget or shake off. There was just this scene of one woman seeing another
woman who was helpless and in pain, and she was helpless and in pain.
It was so real, I responded; I really reacted to her. She moved me so that
tears came to my eyes. Believe me, such moments happen rarely, if ever again,
in the early things I was doing out there."
In '53, Bancroft could be seen on cinema screens in Tonight We
Sing, Treasure of the Goldon Condor and The Kid From Left
Field. Her engagement to John Ericson a thing of the past, it was time: "I
was making $500 a week, I didn't even know from a 'B' picture. The script said
'Laugh,' I laughed; 'Cry,' I cried, I was just doing me. Then I married
this guy. Not, not an actor, his occupation was being a rich boy. His mother
was a Texas oilman." Anne wed Martin A. May on July 1, '53: "We had a civil
ceremony first, then Mama wanted us married in church, and anything for
Millie. So on our first anniversary we decided to drive back to New York for
the church ceremony." Professionally, Bancroft phased-out '53 with an
appearance on NBC-TV's Kraft Theatre, in To Live in Peace, aired Dec.
16th.
During this period Anne was quoted: "Working in pictures makes great demands. There are
personal appearances and testes when your not on a picture and when you are working there is no
time for anything else." That '54, movie audiences saw her in Gorilla at Large (filmed
in 3D), Demetrius and the Gladiators and The Raid. "I was seduced by every
script. I thought every picture was the best, and that I was Greta Garbo. It was the ability to
accept these terrible lies that kept me going." But not at Fox; upon completion of The
Raid they dropped Bancroft. On television, Anne had recently starred in a dramatization of
Earnest Hemingway's The Capital of the World. Now on Nov. 25, '54, she played Lolita in
A Medal for Benny on NBC's Video Theatre.
Freelancing, Bancroft returned to movie screens in '55 in Warner Bros.' New York
Confidential. She then returned to Fox for a role in A Life in the Balance. United
Artists cast her oposite Farley Granger in The Brass Ring, later released as The
Naked Street. Back in televisionland, she starred in the CBS Lux Video Theater
production of Forever Female, June 23, '55. Columbia Pictures signed Anne to a "two
picture deal," the first of which was The Last Frontier: "When I was in Mexico on
location we had this long drive from the bottom of a mountain all the way to Mexico City. I
used to get pretty bored on these drives, so I was shouting out the window, 'Hello you people
-- Here I am! You lucky people, you!' So tthe five guys in this car followed us all the way to
the hotel! That's the only funny thing that happened to me back then, only it wasn't in
Hollywood--it was in Mexico. Nothing funny happens in Hollywood."
Upon completion of The Last Frontier, Anne turned-up at M-G-M to play an Indian
Girl in The Last Hunt, a Western being shot on location in South Dakota. In the midst of
filming a scene in which she and her co-star Stewart Granger were riding horseback together,
the horse "skittered," causing Bancroft to sustain "a nerve pinched between two vertebrae" that
would result in her return to New York for three-months confinement in bed. Debra Paget,
Hollywood's enternal starlet, replaced Bancroft in The Last Hunt.
A recovered Anne returned to filmaking in Universal's '56 release, Walk the Proud
Land. Then it was tv-time again, with starring roles in Lux Video Theater's NBC
presentations of Hired Wife (Feb. 23) and The Corrigan Case (June 21), and on
CBS' Climax in Fear Is the Hunter, telecast live that July 12th. Anne then played
Alegre in Key Largo on NBC's Alcoa Hour (Oct. 14). The release of her second
Columbia feature, Nightfall, followed in December '56. That same month she filmed a role
in So Soon to Die for CBS-TV's Playhouse 90, aired Jan 17, '57 (now circulating
channels as a "TV Movie").
Returning to Fox, she starred oposite future boyfriend Scott Brady in The Restless
Breed. And restless she was: on the heels of Anne's telling comment, "The only men in my
life from now on will be my father, my agent, my press agent and my psychiatrist," Martin May
told a judge his wife was away from home "for months on end. She tried to combine two loves--a
marriage and a career. The career turned out to be the greater of the two." May was granted a
divorce Feb. 13, '57. Bancroft later mused, "I was even a failure as a Hollywood housewife."
Anne sought refuge in her work, appearing next in the Playhouse 90 presentation of
Invitation to a Gunfighter (Mar. 7), then in The Mad Bomber, telecast live on
Climax (Apr. 18), and in the Alcoa Hour presentation of Hostages to
Fortune (July 7).
Cinema-wise, the girl who debuted in scenes opisite Marilyn Monroe now shared celluloid
with the doubtable talents of an ersatz MM, Mamie Van Doren, in United Artists' the
The Girl in Black Stockings. She had come full-circle: looking around in '57, twenty-six
year old Anne Bancroft couldn't help but realize that in the factories where fantasies were
turned into celluloid realities, most starlets her age had become little more than well-used
flesh clinging to the perimeter of an already lost dream. "When I went to Hollywood under
contract to Fox, I thought I had arrived; on a clear day you could've seen my swelled head from
Pasadena! Then, I found that instead of going forward I was going sideways. Seven years of
that--including two at Fox and five of freelancing--and I knew I had to take inventory of
myself."
The turning point: "The only reason I'm not still doing Daughter of Gorilla at
Large is that my personal life had become a shambles. There was a lot of drinking in
Hollywood. When I would be driving and get home and wake up in the morning and not know how I
got there, I was scared to death -- absolutely. It really began one night in '57. For five
years I had been telling myself lies about the kind of life I was living. In reality, every
picture I did was worse than the last one, and every man I was in love with was worse than the
last one. I was terribly immature. I was beginning to have a lot of lonely times out there when
there was nothing to do, and I would have to look at myself--at the thoughts that came into my
mind--and it was a very dangerous time. I was going steadily down-hill in terms of self-respect
and dignity; I was completely demoralized by the time I left Hollywood." On that significantly
important day in her life, "Someone must have hollered at me too loud because I just went home,
packed my bag, and asked someone to phone my mother Millie to say I was returning to New York.
That was the first time in my life I made a decision entirely on my own. And that was when I
was ready to be an actress!"
Bancroft enrolled in Herbert Berghof's acting school. After 4 months, Bergof commented:
"She is like a little daughter of Anna Magnani." Richard Basehart (Anne's So Soon to Die
co-star) was the catalyst of her new incarnation; in January '57, Basehart had recomended
Bancroft to producer Fred Coe as the "ideal choice" to play the Jewish eccentric in Two for
the Seesaw. Anne recalls, "The first time I read the script I skipped the stage directions,
I already knew what Gittel was going to do." She added, "That taught me that never again
should I take a part unless on the first reading I could shout inside, 'Yeah, I know her!' I
don't buy furs anymore, I buy freedom by not working unless something moves me that way."
Indeed, "I wanted the part of Gittel in the worst way. Sitting there, waiting for Mr.
Coe, an inspiration came over me, because I was so desperate. I had to get back on my feet as
an actress after all those years in Hollywood. As I waited in that outside office it dawned on
me suddenly that I should take my shoe off and be discovered scratching my toe; I was
scratching my toe when he came out. I said, 'Hello. Do you have a john? I have to go so bad.'
Suddenly Gittel came up out of me. He was astounded."
Anne, now engaged to Mario Ferrari-Ferreira ("distantly related to the Italian auto
family") recalls Seesaw's out-of-town tryouts were not without unexpected fun: co-star
Henry Fonda must've been startled the night "I went on without my pants! I'm supposed to grab
my pajamas and run into this back room and put them on. At the Washington opening I only
grabbed half of them, and I went back to change, and it was the bottom part I didn't get. If it
was the top part I didn't get I wouldn't have been able to come out!"
Two for the Seesaw opened at the Booth Theater on Broadway, Jan. 16, '58. "N.Y.
Times" critic Brooks Atkinson wrote: "Anne Bancroft ... unknown to this department until last
evening ... creates a gallant character." The "N.Y. Post's" Richard Watts Jr. noted: "Bancroft
has humor, fire, emotional power, depth, insight and variety." And the "N.Y. Journal
American's" John McClain commented: "Bancroft threatens at times to take the entire theater
under her arm and go home. She can swear outlandishly without being at all vulgar; in the next
sentence she can break your heart." Columnist Louis Sobol added, "She is a happy, young blend
of the best of Judy Holliday and Shelly Winters."
Anne was quoted: "I can't really believe those reviews. I don't want to read them again.
It might make me stop wishing to grow. I might feel too self-satisfied." Bancroft added, "The
sweetness of Gittel cam from my father. The toughness came from my sister who, after reading
the reviews and my name wasn't up in lights said to me, 'What are they waiting for,
bulbs?' "
Editions carrying word of her Broadway debut advised tele-viewers they could catch
Bancroft in a newly filmed half-hour drama, A Time to Cry, on Jan. 17th's airing of
ABC's The Frank Sinatra Show. In June, she got a new Seesaw co-star when Dana
Andrews replaced Henry Fonda. On television Anne facinated viewers of The JAck Paar Show
with tales about life in Hollywood. That October, the Bancroft currently on view in "Rheingold
Beer" ads passed an audition that made her a bona fide member of the esteemed Actors Studio.
Fame can be the catalyst by which one recalls an otherwise surely forgettable
event. In '58 I spent part of a late evening in the company of Ms. Bancroft and two mutual
friends. While Anne awaited her boyfriend (Mario Ferrari-Ferreira now gone, that week columnist
Walter Winchell had blind-itemed: "Anne Bancroft's new beaumance is a deep dark secret!"), the
four of us joked, sang folk-songs ina group-embrace, and even posed for snapshots. She was
impressively natural, vulnerably real. Sometime after midnight a well-used auto arrived, Anne's
"secret" clearly visible at it's wheel. The happy star of Two for the Seesaw bid us an
affectionate goodnight and departed with her fella. This would likely be an obscure memory were
it not for the fact Anne Bancroft--then enjoying the intitial peak of her notable Broadway
fame--lives at the center of my vivid recollection. Seven years later our paths would cross
gain in a highly personal atmosphere, this time sans jokes and folk-songs as we made our
separate ways into a NYC chapel to attend the funeral of Paula Strasberg. While other famous
faces present were little more than a blur given the circumstances, I was struck by the
Bancroft Look: minus detectable makeup, hair sculptured for ltimate effect, her outffit
impeccable; this was clearly a sophisticated lady, and not the singing-midnight-gypsy of
Seesaw days.
"I have a diffucult time remembering what I was like in the past. I grow so quickly.
Things that made me cry yesterday don't make me cry today--which is why I think I have such an
intense feeling about acting, why this is really the only dependable thing I have. When
I'm really good, it's Christmas everywhere; there's a joy that comes from acting that
just does not exist in anything else I do." For her performance in Two for the Seesaw,
Bancroft won the Antoinette Perry Award (Tony). She left the show June 27, '59.
Anne's encore effort was destined to dwarf her Seesaw success: "I had to do some
very extensive preparation work for William Gibson's The Miracle Worker." At NYC's
Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, "I worked with blinded children, spent three
weeks with them. Then I taped my eyes with bandages and went to a strange city, strange hotel
room, and did the things one does in a normal day; the experiences I had during this blindness
were absolutely frightening. One morning I got up and washed my eyes--I thought I would just
take the bandages off for a few seconds, but when my eyes blinked and I saw the bathroom, which
to me was the most fantasic color pink, I can't tell you how beautiful it was. I found out
later it was really brown! I thought of that deaf, blind child Helen Keller as my own deafness
and blindness to the real world. I was in trouble again in my personal life, so bringing Helen
Keller to a heathly life was for me bringing myself to a psychologically healthy state. If I
had not done that, by now I might have been dead. It was vitally important for me to see and to
hear."
And there were unexpected rewards: "I had to learn the Manual Alphabet, and I found
myself in a situation where there was a deaf-blind man nobody could understand; he was trying
to comunicate with someone. I went up and spelled in his hand, 'W-h-a-t d-o y-o-u w-a-n-t?' And
he said back, 'M-y-b-a-g.' I never felt so important in my life; this man was in trouble and I
was the only one that understood him. I went out and found out about his luggage and came back
and spelled in his hand, 'E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g i-s a-l-r-i-g-h-t!' Then he said to me, 'W-h-a-t
i-s y-o-u-r n-a-m-e?' "
Following out-of-town tryouts, The Miracle Worker opened on Broadway Oct. 19,
'59. This time Richard Watts Jr. wrote: "If anyone was foolish enough to believe that Miss
Bancroft's triumph in Mr. Gibson's Two for the Seesaw might have been an accident, her
moving, beautiful, vital performance as Annie Sullivan would make him ashamed of himself." John
McClain wrote: "If there was ever the slightest question about Miss Bancroft's versatility it
can now be answered. In Seesaw, she was Jewish, now she is Irish; she is forthright,
explicit, funny and enormously endearing." Referring to her 12-year-old co-star, the "World
Telegram & Sun's" Frank Aston predicted: "Anne Bancroft and little Patty Duke will shatter
every crowd that gathers in the Playhouse for months to come." The "N.Y. Mirror's" Robert
Coleman added, "Bancroft ... what an unforgettable characterization she etches as the
courageous Annie Sullivan. It will leave an indelible imprint on your mind and heart." The
play's most noted moment was a fight scene between Bancroft and Duke. "Time" magazine would
later comment: "The big fight as briefly as 8 minutes 10 seconds; at its best, one night in
Philidelphia, it lasted longer than 12 minutes." The show's director, Arthur Penn added:
"Everyone, including myself, was too moved to do anything rational, let alone punch a stop
watch. The audience came out of its seats yelling."
I was present the evening Bancroft confronted an insensitive theatergoer. As the curtain
rose on Act One, a man seated in the front row placed his hat on the edge of the stage,
topside! Miracle's thespians managed through a number of the play's highly dramatic,
difficult scenes, seemingly ignoring the distracting item rudely inhabiting their theatrical
atmosphere. Finally, Bancroft picked up a water pitcher on the set, broke from her performance,
and slowly poured it's entire liquid contents atop the unsolicited piece of set-decoration!
Then withm visible determination, Bancroft crushed the offensive item into a pancake-like
flattened circle! All this was done without comment as the chapeau's stunned owner looked on
agape. A fascinated audience applauded thunderously. Paying no heed to the applausem Anne
turned, ordering the pitcher refilled, and walked back into the interupted action. It was a
memorable night at the theater. For her brilliant work in The Miracle Worker, Bancroft
won another Tony Award.
Continuing her studies at the Actors Studio, Anne commented: "Not long ago, I tackled
the Eliza Doolittle role in My Fair Lady there. The Studio is the most effectual
workshop available to the professional actor. Mr. Strasberg believes I ought to concentrate on
the classics; that's my project for the next year." More publicly visible, Anne sat for a
revealing Mike Wallace interview, and she made the cover of "Time" magazine, Dec. 21,
'59. Tele-viewers were treated to Bancroft Person to Person on Mar. 11, '60 (taped, the
program was repeated June 10th).
Bancroft returned to United Artists in '61 to commit her Annie Sullivan performance to
celluloid. Again, Patty Duke co-starred in The Miracle Worker (filmed on the East
Coast). Cinema-wise, the fight scene consumed 8-minuted: "That scene was written down word for
word. It was like a ballet; you move, now Patty moves, now you raise your arm, now she does."
Movie buffs might enjoy knowing that the scrambled eggs Duke threw into Bancroft's face in the
'62 release were mixed with popcorn "to make them less slippery." Asked if Hollywood had
changed any, Anne quipped, "Not at all. That's the tragedy of it."
United Artists, in pre-production on the film version of Two for the Seesaw,
offered it's producers one of two deals: Elizabeth Taylor and a budget of $5,000,000 -or- Anne
and a budget of $500,000. "I'd have given anything to make the movie of that, but it got away
from me," lamented Anne. Shirley Maclaine went before the cameras as Gittel on locations near
Bancroft's Greenwich Village abode. Anne admitted she was glad she didn't chance upon the film
crew: "I probably would have tried to get into the picture." Instead, on Apr. 6, '62, the "N.Y.
Herald Tribune" advised: "Negotiations have just begun for her play the title role in a musical
about Fanny Brice now in preparation on the West Coast." Bancroft's withdrawal from the project
ultimately paved the way for Barbra Streisand's springboard to fame in Funny Girl ('64).
The recognition-factor is the barometer of an actress' fame. On the day in '62 that the
vulnerable Marilyn Monroe died, Anne Bancroft told an interviewer: "I was walking in the
neighborhood recently, and as I passed two bystanders, I could see they were watching me, and I
heard my name. That was one of the saddest discoveries of my life." Circa that period Bancroft
was quoted: "In life nobody ever really understands you. The only thing you can wish for
is somebody to accept you and love you for what you are, without really understanding why you
are what you are."
Feb. '61: "I was rehearsing for The Perry Como Show at the Ziegfeld Theater in
New York, singing a song called 'Married I Can Always Get,' and I heard a voice yell out from
the darkness, 'Hey Anne Bancroft! I'm Mel Brooks!' I knew the minute I met him I was gonna
marry him. He didn't share this intuition. But the day we met, I instantly raced to the
analyst I was seeing and said, 'OK, prepare me, I have just met my future husband!' "
Bancroft returned to the Broadway stage in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and her
Children, at the Martin Beck Theater Mar. 28, '63. Anne was asked why she elected to to
play such a difficult role: "It's because the audience for the first time is against me. I have
to fight for any sympathy I get, and it takes hard steady concentration." The production was
panned, critics suggested Bancroft was too young to portray Mother Courage: "Something
else than age was bothering them.If they really became involved with the character, they would
have lost track of that factor." It was from the stafe of the MArtin Beck on Apr. 8th that Anne
rushed to her West 11th Street brownstone (purchased in '62 for $95,000) in time to see Joan
Crawford step up to the Academy Awards Show posium and accept Bancroft's Oscar for her
incredible portrait of Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker; Anne gasping "Joan looks
just like me on television." Asked next day if she thought her performance deserved the coveted
prize, Anne grinned, "Well, if that means was I better than anyone else... the answer is yes."
Talking with our mutual friend, the aforementioned Paula Strasberg, in '63 Anne
explained: "It is not an easy thing to go down deep into myself and bring things up that , if I
were not an actress, I wouldn't have to look at again and again. Building a character based on
your own experiences is no joke. That's one reason I choose parts so carefully." She added,
"All the big parts I've played were women who were extremely strong. There was just no doubt
that they would survive. Those parts they offer me--the steel spine, the strength, all that--I
know I can do those. But there's another side of myself I don't think I've used. If I played
the part of a woman who wasn't surviving, Paula, you would believe me wouldn't you?"
Anne next read the cinema script for The Pumpkin Eater: "I was being considered
along with a dozen other actresses. I cabled British director Jack Clayton, 'Only I can play
this role.' He cabled back, 'Please send stills.' " Bancroft sent stills of the fight scene
from The Miracle Worker, to which Clayton responded: "From these still I can't tell what
you look like. Send more." Anne flew to London so Clayton could see her in person. She got the
part. And she found herself in the midst of yet another famous fight scene: it took
two-and-a-half days to film the 45-second sequence in The Pumpkin Eater, with co-star
Peter Finch noting: "I had to remind myself she was only acting. I thought she was going to
kill me." In Sept. '63 Anne told an interviewer, "When this movie is finished, I am going back
to the Actors Studio to do The Three Sisters."
When The Pumpkin Eater opened in '64, "Time" magazine's critic noted: "The
ironing out of a well-kept wife's unkempt psyche is portrayed with harrowing perception by Anne
Bancroft." Indeed, she delivered an utterly fragile characterization in the Royal Films
International Release, the film itself marred by a dramatic pacing better suited to stage
production than the energetic medium of cinema. "N.Y. Times" critic Bosley Crowther wrote: "The
validity of the picture teeters precariously on the over-agonized performance of Miss Bancroft
... For this she was voted the best actress at the Cannes Film Festival this year." In
addition, Anne won the British Film Academy best-foreign-actress award, and received a Best
Actress Oscar Nomination for her work in The Pumpkin Eater.
The Anne who romantically persued "Tall, handsome, wanted-by-everybody" men was long
gone circa '64: "Mel never proposed to me, I asked him. People think we're an unlikely couple;
wrong, we're perfect." The devilish Brooks added, "We're so close we interchange roles; I can
become the wonderfully statuesque, feminine Anne Bancroft, she becomes the Yiddish Mel. Well
have you ever seen me in eyelashed and Dior, or her in a yarmulke?" They wed in New York, Aug.
5, '64, Anne recalling: "Nobody even recognized me when I went to City Hall to get married."
Her next professional exposure came Nov. 6, '64, on NBC-TV's Bob Hope Chrysler
Theater in William Inge's Out on the Outskirts of Town. In Apr. '65 Patricia NEal
began filming 7 Women at MGM. Three days later, a press release advised, "Anne was
called to Hollywood to replace Patricia when Miss Neal suffered a stroke." (In the confines of
the Actors Studio, I've been told Bancroft is ever-prepared, "ready to go on at the mere hint
that another actor won't show for that day's presentation.") 7 Women was released in
'66, with a "N.Y. Times" critic advising: "What steadies the picture is a fine, tough, earthy
performance by Miss Bancroft." Still in '65, Anne moved on to Paramount for a role in The
Slender Thread. On Aug. 8, it was announced in the "N.Y. Times" that she would star on the
Broadway stage in Outside There, Somewhere--!: "Miss Bancroft was responsible for
initiating the project. She read the book by Lucille Kallen, liked it and asked the author to
make a play of it for her." Nothing further was heard of the effort. Meanwhile, Bancroft did
return to Broadway, in The Devils (based on Aldous Huxley's The Devils of
Loudun), at the Broadway Theater, Nov. 16, '65. It was an unhappy experience, with Douglas
Watt reporting in the "Daily News" (Jan 12, '66) Bancroft "had missed 11 performances during
the Boston tryout and then a dozen or so here, including four on Christmas weekend. Yet, though
bedded by back injury during her last absence she returned for the final performance and,
according to a spokesman for the show, played her role in such a low key that she infuriated
the rest of the cast." Zoe Caldwell had filled-in for an absent Bancroft in this show that
closed after 31 performances. (Vanessa Redgrave starred in Warner Bros.' dismal '71 film
version.)
Theater-wise, Anne bounced back briefly when it was announced she would star in a
two-week presentation of The Skin of Our Teeth, opening June 21, '66 at the Berkshire
Theater Festival. Television captured her next in I'm Getting Married, on the Mar. 16,
'67 edition of ABC Stage 67. She then played Regina in Lillian Hellman's Then Little
Foxes on stage at New York's Vivian Beaumont Theater, opening for a limited run that Oct.
26th. Just ahead of Anne lay yet another career milestone: she had made a film for Embassy
Pictures that was about to go into release, The Graduate. The producers originally
wanted Jeanne Moreau to portray MRs. Robinson, "the neurotic, bed-oriented matron who seduces"
Dustin Hoffman. The Graduate would bring Bancroft her third Best Actress Oscar
Nomination.
Vactioning in Stockbridge, Massachusetts in Aug. '68, I chanced upon Anne in a Berkshire
Theater Festival production of William Gibson's A Cry of Players.What struck me most
about the evening was the thespic generosity with which BAncroft subdued herself on stage in
order that the young man sharing the platform with her, Frank Langella, could go forth and
shine. (In my quarter-century of theatergoing, I have only seen that happen one other time,
when the gifted Shelley Winters turned her back to Minnie Boys' audiences in '70, and
sat absolutely motionless while a youth named Daniel Fortus show-stoppingly sang "Mama, A
Rainbow" to her. From my vantage point in the orchestra, I could plainly see tears streaking
down Winters' face. They were catching.) Bancroft repeated her role when A Cry of
Players opened at the Vivian Beaumont Nov. 14, '68, playing in rotating-repertory with
King Lear (sans Bancroft) for 72 performances into Feb. '69.
Professionally, the Bancroft name was not heard from again until the evening of Feb. 18,
'70 when CBS televised her special, Annie, The Women in the Life of a Man to an
estimated "26 million viewers." The "N.Y. Times" critic called the hour "Truly a tour de force
of such a multiplicity of charms, humor and talent that it is almost hard to believe.
Rightfully, she should be the toast of the country." The critic for "The Cleveland Press"
added, "The evening belonged to to Miss Bancroft who, last night, became a living lady legend."
Anne's tv special was voted the Best Variety Program of 1970 Emmy Award.
Bancroft's long professional association with director Arthur Penn (Two for the
Seesaw, etc.) was somewhat disrupted when she had a May 24, '70 repeat television airing of
the NET telementary Arthur Penn: An American Identity yanked because "she had not given
a release on a film segment in the show featuring her on location being mugged for publicity or
test shots by a still photographer." NET promised to to edit the offending sequence out of the
90-minute program.
Bancroft returned to cinema screens in '72, playing Winston Churchill's mother in
Columbia's Young Winston, filmed in London. Back on the home front Mrs. Mel Brooks
confronted motherhood in person, giving birth to a son, Maximilian, in the summer of '72.
"Motherhood, what an assignment!" When asked about Maximilian some years later, Mama Brooks
answered: "We do not discuss him publicly, ever. Our work is public, out other life is not.
That emphatically includes our son." (It is probable that little Max was the inspiration behind
the Brooks' cameo appearances on a Mickey Mouse tv special in '78, and a Muppets
tv special in '79.) The family now maintained homes in Beverly Hills and Greenwich Village.
In Sept. '73 Bancroft went before the cameras in The Prisoner of Second Avenue (a
'75 Warner Bros. Release). On Nov. 27, '74 she came back to television in a new ABC special,
Annie and the Hoods. Asked about her singing therein, Bancroft allowed, "I'm no Beverly
Sills, but listen, I always sang." The critic for "Variety" called Annie and the
Hoods "an embarrassment ... As for star Bancroft, she was versatile to the point of being a
charicature of the jaded superstar." Chrismas '75 Anne could be seen on cinema screens in
another kind of disaster, Universal's The Hindenberg. In '76, Bancroft turned-up in
Paramount's Lipstick and Fox's Silent Movie.
There are those who've critisized Bancroft's sometimes off-beat posturing. A
world-renowned cinema star confined to me that Anne's excursions to classes at the Actors
Studio circa '76 inspired snickers on the part of fellow students and friends who'd witnessed a
Bancroft they couldn't readily relate to; one given to putting on "Ladylike airs" in an arena
where pretense is best reserved for the stage, the audience, the media. During the '50s and
'60s I had glimpsed some of the world's most glamorous women arriving for study sessions at the
Studio; always they came casually dressed, usually sans makeup, completely their private
selves. My observer told me Bancroft appeared in this very atmosphere "behaving as though
she'd just condescended over from a Park Avenue penthouse -- with all the
breeding of a Valderbilt." Professional charm aside, the attitude turned-off some who still
recalled with a degree of fondness the down-to-earth Anne-of-yore. Bancroft's "method actress"
training might've been partially responsible for the unwelcome posture: in recent times she'd
portrayed LAdy Jennie Churchill and Hindenburg's The Countess. Had Anne been rehearsing
her performances, testing them on fellow students, even friends? Or was she becoming the
part?
Still in '76, Anne filmed the role of Mary Magdalene in Jesus of Nazareth, the
most expensive ($18,000,000) movie ever made for television; subsequently presented as an NBC
mini-series Easter season '77, with an estimated "90 million viewers" tuned-in. Also, Bancroft
sat for a filmed interview for a behind-the-scenes Jesus of Nazareth tv special, aired
in Rome Sept. '76.
The Turning Point: in the beginning Fox wanted Audrey Hepburn opposite Princess
Grace (Kelly); Prince Rainier vetoed Grace's cinema comeback; Hepburn "requested a
million dollars to play Emma"; end of plan one. Anne signed to play Emma in the summer of '76,
taking ballet training from Sono Osato & Nora Kaye. "I identified with Emma because I too made
a choice in my life to have a career, and no matter what I would have that career -- and pay
the price of it. And I have." With The Turning Point Bancroft was to reach heights of
emoting heretofore visible from the likes of a Kim Stanley, a Geraldine Page. It was to co-star
Shirley MacLaine's credit that she dared share Bancroft's cinema frames. In fact, the film
lives because of their extraordinary performances. Together they survived repetitious
dialogue, faulty editing, and a plethora of sub-plot cliches. Curiously, it'd been long enough
since I'd MacLaine light up the big screen for her close-up image to evoke thought of the more
recent cinema face or Lily Tomlin. But after all was said and done, it was Bancroft who earned
moviegoers' boxoffice dollars all the way through the '77 release, about which "Newsweek"
magazine's David Ansen wrote: "Emma is a prima donna, as well as being a gifted and generous
artist, and Bancroft is sensational in this tricky role." The critic for "Cue" magazine noted:
"The Bravura performances of Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine recall the colorful emotional
fireworks we used to associate with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford." Bancroft received Best
Actress nominations from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the British Academy
of Film Arts, and the Golden Globe Awards. Asked about her fourth Oscar Nomination, Anne
responded: "If you're in the running you'd like to win ... I would like to win." The National
Board of Review voted her Best Actress of '77'. The film whose qualities I question, The
Turning Point recieved a staggering eleven Oscar Nominations (MacLaine, etc.), but failed
to win in any category.
Concurrent with the release of The Turning Point, Bancroft returned to Broadway
in William Gibson's Golda, of which Prime Minister Golda Meir said: "I have no
objections to her playing my life evn though she's not Jewish. Does an actress have to be
Polish to play a Polish woman?" A grateful Bancroft noted: "I can site with anybody in a room
for an hour, and by the time they leave, automatically I will know the way talk and the way
they move. That's my special art." The current object of her "special art" came in person to
the Morosco Theater to view Bancroft's Golda at a preview, Nov. 6, '77. the play opened
Nov. 14, with "N.Y. Times" critic Richard Eder stating: "Bancroft's real acomplishment is her
recreation not of Mrs. Meir's floppy dresses, but of her mind and spirit. Golda is to be
remembered for the spectacle of an actress overwhelmed by the character she plays, and yet able
to master it almost completely." The "Daily News' " Douglas Watt commented: "If Miss Bancroft
is helpless as the lifeless core of this impossible piece of playwriting, then those arounf her
are mere dust particles." Golda closed after 93 performances (some played by Bancroft's
understudy Tresa Hughes).
Television advertisements alerted viewers Bancroft would appear in a scene from
Golda on ABC's May 8 '78 special, The Stars Salute Irsael, but the sequence did
not materialize on the program. Nominated for a Best Actress for Golda, Bancroft didn't
win. "I will think very deeply before I do another Broadway show. The cost is extremely high
and I often wonder if it's worth it." An entertainment headline that July advised, "Fox hoping
rewritten Golda will be golden on silver screen for Bancroft."
Anne learned another lesson about the importance of the written page that night "I came
back late from a difficult rehearsal. Mel had been working at home all day. I wailed, 'Acting
is so hard.' Mel picked up a blank sheet of paper and held it in front of me. 'That's
what's hard,' he said. I've never complained about acting again." Instead, she sat down to
write. Expanding her creative abilities, short years before she had become a member of the
American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women. During the Spring of '79, Anne
alternated from in front of to behind the motion picture cameras at her starlet days alma mater
20th Century-Fox, starring in and directing her own screenplay of Fatso,
the feature an expansion of a '78 project at the American Film Institute. As a 28-year-veteran
of the medium, Bancroft was meeting her greatest challenge yet, cinema-wise.
It was iluminating spending a day on director-actress Bancroft's movie set. Fascinating,
in fact, to observe the actress in Bancroft emote from her director's vantage point
behind the Panavision camera, emulating the very performance she was helming; licking
her lips when her actor licked his, etc. I watched with rapt attention, too, when
director Bancroft--dissatisfied with the results of a scene in which a derelict walks
into camera view and sits down--on subsequent 'takes' physically spun the actor in circles a
dozen times herself before point him towards camera range, causing the cinematic effect of a
naturally-dizzy "drunk." During lunch, we were reintroduced after some two decades. Back at
work, Anne directed and appeared in the next scene, pausing between shots to review her
performance on a television monitor, courtesy of videotape-playback. Bancroft looked on
intently as her voice emanated from the machine: "What the hell are you doing here!?"; and
Fatso co-star Dome DeLuise reacted with comedic pathos. During 'takes' on of Anne's
key-lit close-ups, I walked 'extra' as part of Bancroft's cinema background. "Cut!" It was
early evening when Anne departed, lamenting that despite utter exhaustion, she had a
theater-date but an hour away. In all, the day was a unique, if tiring experience.
In October of '79, a rejuvenated Bancroft traveled back to England, this time to star in
EMI-Paramount's filmization of The Elephant Man. A yet more fascinating motion picture
project awaited Anne upon completion of The Elephant Man, as evidenced by Columnist
Marilyn Beck's news (June 12th) that "Bancroft has decided she will be Mommie Dearest
after all. Probably. She agreed last year to take on the challenge of portraying Joan Crawford
in Frank Rablans' big-screen translation of the bitter memoirs of Christina Crawford." Anne
Bancroft as cinema legend Joan Crawford! And all that remained win the way of this
widely outed controversial '80 film project was "some rewriting" of the Mommie Dearest
script, and that "we hire a director Anne's satisfied with ... she's promised to keep herself
available until Yablans can work those things out." Whatever the outcome, by Christmastime '79
Anne Maria Louise Italiano was light years away from the starlet-time girl who'd eagerly
portrayed Hollywood-style Indian maidens and gun molls during the early Fifties.
The earthy star who told '60 PErson to Person viewers, "When I was in radio I was
Anne St. Raymond, when I was in television I was Anne Marno, and then in movies I was Anne
Bancroft--If I ever go into burlesque, I've got one picked out: Ruby Pepper!," would
later volunteer: "I just have to get out and do more, because I don't know how long I'm
going to live! 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."
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