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Anne Bancroft Does More Than Act on Monsanto Night Special
"I'm doing most of the things I love," says Academy Award winner Anne Bancroft about her Monsanto Night special which airs on Wednesday, Feb. 18, 8-9 p.m. over CBS-TV.
Miss Bancroft is not only a great dramatic actress, but she sings, dances and clowns it up with the best of them. "Annie the Women in the Life of a Man," the producers gave her songs, dances and hilarious sketches.
John McGiver plays her father in one sketch in which Miss Bancroft marries Dick Shawn. McGiver knew Miss Bancroft as Anne Marie Louise Italiano when she was his pupil in a Bronx High School. They haven't seen eachother since then, but Anne particularly asked for McGiver for the part.
Inevitably, as they rehearsed, they became a bit nostalgic. "You probably didn't know that in those days I was pretty star-struck," Miss Bancroft said. "But all I can remember was Betty Grable and Ginger Rogers. I even had my name all picked out - Betty Rogers. And I wanted to be a blonde."
Those wishes, Miss Bancroft says now, were immature. Her name was changed, and she did appear briefly as a blonde, but being a star is far less important to her than being an actress.
As an actress she feels passionately that she should be able to play any role and do everything.
She's pretty well proved that she can and does, and in the Monsanto Night special she can display the full range of her talents with co-stars Dick Smothers, Lee J. Cobb, Robert Merrill, David Susskind, Jack Cassidy, and Arthur Murray, in addition to Dick Shawn and John McGiver.
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