Where have you gone, Mrs. Robinson? Actress Anne Bancroft has evolved over time within the realm of Legend
By: MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
Edition: FINAL
Section: DAILY BREAK
Date: 2000/05/30
"And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.
Jesus loves you more than you will know.
Stand up tall, Mrs. Robinson.
God in heaven smiles on those who are brave."
- From the Grammy Award "best song" winner, from the film "The Graduate." Lyrics by Paul Simon.
WHERE is Mrs. Robinson today?
In 1968, in a film that forecast the new youth cult that would eventually take over American society, she was the epitome of the older woman. She was the symbol of the hypocrisy of the older generation - a generation which, up until then, had ruled unruly teen- agers, as well as the movies they saw.
The movie was "The Graduate" and the actress was Anne Bancroft. Both the movie and the actress have evolved within the realm of legend.
The film was all about how young Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), just out of college, was encouraged to go into plastics, and make a fortune. With money the only goal of his already-rich parents, he got seduced by a rich neighbor, Mrs. Robinson - only to later fall in love with her daughter, Elaine.
The seduction of Benjamin was the seduction of an entire generation. The fact that it was a phony and cold seduction said something.
In downtown Norfolk, there were lines all around the block, waiting just to get in Loew's Theater, then the largest movie theater in Virginia. Joseph E. Levine, the film's producer, on the way to Florida via the inland waterway, harbored his yacht in Norfolk just to count the money - and be sure he was getting his share.
He, and the film, had hit on something theretofore untapped - the newfound rebellion of the youth audience. If James Dean and "Rebel Without a Cause" had announced the discontent of disillusioned young people, "The Graduate" cemented it.
The song "Mrs. Robinson," written by Paul Simon and recorded by Simon and Art Garfunkel, became No. 1 throughout the land - and went on to win two Grammy Awards. By the end of 1968, "The Graduate" was the third-highest-grossing movie in film history.
Where, indeed, is Mrs. Robinson in the year 2000? She's "Up at the Villa." That's the title of actress Bancroft's new film, currently in local theaters.
An Academy Award winner, and a nominee three other times, she remains very much a star.
Her new film, which co-stars Sean Penn and Kristen Scott Thomas, features Bancroft as Princess San Ferdinando, the stinging queen bee of the Anglo-American expatriate community in 1938 Florence - just before World War II and the rise of Musolini.
"It's about time they cast me as a princess, don't you think?" Bancroft said as she sat in a lounge at the Essex House Hotel in New York on a recent Sunday morning. "There's a lot of that princess in me. The princess from the Bronx. She's elegant and she's controlling. That's not me. I can't control anything. But she is a liar. That's me. To be an actress, you have to be a liar."
Based on the Somerset Maugham novel, "Up at the Villa" concerns an illicit romance between a British widow (Thomas) and a rowdy, dashing American, played by Sean Penn in a role that surprises his audiences by trying an elegant Cary Grant look.
Bancroft plays a princess via marriage. Actually, she's an American widow, once married to Italian nobility, who now tries to control the people around her through elaborate social arrangements. She has made a rich match for Thomas and is infuriated when the ungrateful romantic chooses Penn instead.
"It is a disturbed part of her life," Bancroft said. The character, not an easy one to play, must have both elegance and streetwise toughness. She is a pretender who reveals the weariness and sadness from the hard work of holding on.
None of that is a part of the real-life Anne Bancroft as she cheerfully talks about her present life.
"Do I like the movie `Up at the Villa?' Well, dear, I wouldn't be getting up this early in the morning to face you if I didn't. This was a woman I wanted to show you. I make one movie a year. I don't think there are enough good parts that warrant me getting up early enough to go to work."
Mrs. Robinson, as personified by Bancroft, is now 68. The older woman is now, actually, older. At the time she played the role in "The Graduate," she was just 36 - only six years older than Dustin Hoffman, who was playing age 21.
Is she amazed at the place "The Graduate" has acquired in social and film history?
"I'm not surprised today. It's been a gradual process during which the film has grown in stature. None of us, though, had any idea that it was much when we were filming it."
Bancroft admits she was not ecstatic about getting the part. "I wanted to control all those suggested sex and nude scenes. There wasn't actually any nudity - just suggested, but I wanted her to be suave and tasteful."
Kathleen Turner has created a sensation on the London stage by playing Mrs. Robinson in the nude. "Kathleen is free to do whatever is necessary to seduce that boy," Bancroft said. "Personally, I never felt nudity was necessary. But I do think boys probably should be seduced. It's a matter of getting on with things. Things such as life."
Bancroft's history has always been perceived as the initially unappreciated starlet who ran away from Hollwyood and became a star on the Broadway stage. After arriving in Hollywood, in 1952, she was cast in 15 mediocre films for six years. When the option for her contract came up at 20th Century-Fox, it wasn't renewed. But she was already on Broadway.
She doesn't feel remorseful about her early Hollywood years. "I thought Hollywood was the cat's meow," she said. "I thought being in those movies was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. I WASN'T a serious actress yet. I didn't even know what a serious actress was. I wanted to be a movie star. Since I was a little girl in the Bronx, I wanted to be SOMEBODY.
"To be somebody, to me, meant to be Marlene Dietrich or Jean Harlow and drag fox furs around the floor. I had no idea that acting meant digging into yourself and coming up with something that resembled truth. That all came to me later. First I had to discover myself. Then I could work out roles - these women - these women I've played."
Born Anna Maria Louise Italiano in the Bronx, she began studying dance at age 4.
Using the name Anne Marino, she broke into television in the 1950s. Her Hollywood debut was as Richard Widmark's girlfriend, a slightly tarnished cabaret singer, in "Don't Bother to Knock" (1952). The star of the film was Marilyn Monroe, which meant no one noticed Bancroft's supporting part.
In 1958, the much-miscast starlet escaped to Broadway and got the coveted role in William Gibson's play "Two for the Seesaw." (No thanks to co-star Henry Fonda, who thought the part should go to a star). She immediately was heralded as a new sensation.
"For all that period, I WAS Gittel Mosca, the kookie Jewish girl I played. I thought I had to BECOME the character. I'm over that foolishness now. First, I had to go through therapy and find out about myself. Now, roles are roles and I'm me. They're two different things."
She promptly won a second Tony Award for playing Helen Keller's teacher in "The Miracle Worker" - a play, more than an individual story, about saving a human being from savagery. This time, the movie version went to her, and she promptly won the Academy Award.
She was not in Hollywood the night she won the Oscar. She was 3,000 miles away on stage in New York in "Mother Courage." The ceremony resulted in a controversy.
She remembers: "They asked me whom I wanted to accept the Oscar in case I won. I said, `One of the greats.' Bette Davis was nominated for `Whatever Happened to Baby Jane," so she couldn't accept for me. Joan Crawford volunteered, and, of course I won, and Joan accepted for me. This made Bette furious. She was mad at both me and Joan. I'm naive about these Hollywood feuds. I still am today."
Years later, Bancroft met Davis. "When I told her my name, Bette Davis simply turned and walked away - not a word," Bancroft said. "I'd always been a great admirer of Bette Davis, but she never spoke to me. I guess that was a REAL princess. I should have learned from her how to play the princess in `Up at the Villa.' "
The honors have continued to pour in for Anne Bancroft. Her four Oscar nominations were for "Agnes of God," "The Turning Point," "The Graduate" and her win for "The Miracle Worker." She won the coveted Cannes Film Festival best-actress honor for playing a neurotic, usually-pregnant British housewife in "The Pumpkin Eater."
But in between roles, she's at ease. "Passion? Yes I have passion for my roles, but the passion almost dies between work. I have to get myself worked up to go back to work. It's quiet in between."
After directing and writing a movie called "Fatso" in 1979, she swears "I will never direct anything else as long as I live."
On the "new Hollywood," she thinks there is hope. "There are roles for older women around - if you just wait. I can wait a long time."
"I think the so-called `independent' movie trend is pretty much a fraud. They can make lousy movies at low budgets just as easily as they can make lousy movies at big budgets - and they do. The only difference is that with independent movies, you don't get any pay. In order to get a good part, they want you to work cheaper. No one wins that way."
She's encouraged, though, by the fact that she got financial backing for a screenplay she's written called "Lovingkindness," based on the novel by Anne Roiphe. She says it's about a woman who rescues Jewish immigrants and gets them to America.
"It's a sign of hope that we could even get a movie like that financed in Hollywood. It will be a movie about intolerance. In contrast, people just want bang. Bang - to go up in space. They don't want to be annoyed by truth."
|