Oscar Winner Anne Bancroft Scans Scripts For New Role
by WILLIAM GLOVER
NEW YORK (AP) -- "If I was in this business for just money," says Anne Bancroft, "I'd be busy--but I'm not, and I'm not worried."
The winsome ace of taut emotions isn't lolling, however, or being exactly neglected. Her house is full of scripts--"I can't count them all"--and "there are a lot of other facets to my life besides acting."
The Bancroft situation, nontheless, is one to give pause to anyone who thinks an Oscar is the road to riches.
The raven-tressed actress, already the possesor of several Broadway awards, won Hollywoods top honor with "The Miracle Worker." In the 20 months since she has had a dissapointing and brief stage run, perused endless bids, appeared a few times on TV and made just one movie, "The Pumpkin Eater"--in a part she had to fight to get.
The picture earned her another "best actress" citation at the Cannes Film Festival. The venture began for Miss Bancroft when, having read the novel and heard about the film project, she got in touch with director-coproducer Jack Clayton, busy in England.
"I thought the story was so right for me, enriching and enlightening. Clayton didn't even know who I was, however, and couldn't have cared less. He went to 'The Miracle Worker' and said he still didn't know what I looked like. So I went to see him and took about five minutes to convince him."
Her ability to register shifting emotion with remarkable facial sensitivity can leave people wondering about her real looks.
"I don't do it deliberately," she says, "but nobody even recognized me when I went to city hall to get married." (Her husband is Mel Brooks, a stage-screen writer).
About those roles that are offered her, and which she steadfastly read all the way through:
"They are either marvelous characters, but no play, or a story that may be good but doesn't excite me or that has been overdone. A lot are sent along just because I won an Oscar."
She is being particularly selective about a stage role to follow smash successes in "Two for the Seesaw" and "The Miracle Worker" and the let-down of "Mother Courage" in which "some of the people involved blocked my will."
Explains Miss Bancroft:
"If I am going to do something in which I will be engaged for more than a year, it has to mean more to me than money. If getting what I want means not appearing regularly, that doesn't worry me."
Then she adds:
"In every other profession, you can make your mistakes in private. In acting it has to be right out in public."
Her intuition centers right now on another novel, title and subject indisclosed. There is a Bancroft aversion to premature courting of chickend.
"It wasn't even sent to me to consider," she comments. "A copy came to my husband so that he could write a blurb for the jacket. I read a few pages and got so interested I sat up all night."
Being a lady diffucult to satisfy on scripts, Miss Bancroft is equally severe critic of her own work.
"There was one perfect performance for me in 'Seesaw' -- I even still remember the date -- a Labor Day matinee. It happened several times in 'Miracle Worker' and once in 'Mother Courage' -- at another matinee."
How about "The Pumpkin Eater"?
"The first time I saw the finished film, I was just looking at the way it had been put together, and didn't even see me.
"The second time I was so racked and dissolved -- I realized why I had wanted to do it."
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