Bronx Miss Is Now An English Lady
By Erskine Johnson
Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD (NEA) -- The kid from the Bronx is a chic, sophisticated upper-crust English lady now.
But it takes the second cup of morning coffee before Anna Maria Italiano, who changed her name to Anne Bancroft, says she can pass for sounding like Greer Garson or Vivien Leigh.
"I roll out of bed every morning sounding like me," this year's Oscar winner said over the long distance phone from London, where she is starring in her first movie since "The Miracle Worker."
"But even after the second cup of coffee," she confessed, "it's some time before I say 'rahther' instead of 'radder.' "
Why Anne Bancroft was two years between films is typical of the young lady who walked out on Hollywood when she discovered that there's a world of difference between "film star" and "actress."
She explained:
"Most of the scripts I read should have been burned. But I flipped over 'The Pumpkin Eater.' The title came from that nursery rhyme about a fellow who 'had a wife and couldn't keep her.' I'm the wife, Peter Finch is the husband."
But just because she won an Oscar did not pave the way for Anne of the Bronx to play a sophiticated English lady with an accent as slick as Rex Harrison's.
When told by her agent that she was being "talked about" for the role, she decided a frontal assult would be better, saying, "You can be talked about until all the producers and film executives in the world are hoarse, but it doesn't get you a good part." Ignoring the agent, ficry Anne cabled producer-director Jack Clayton (the man who made "Room at the Top"):
"No one but me can play this role."
When the "talk" didn't move fast enough for her, she hopped a jet for London and offered to do a screen test in the part for Clayton. An Oscar winner offering to do a screen test was a new one to Clayton, but he was worried more about whether a gal from the Bronx could speak with an English accent.
Five weeks later, with the help of a voice coach, Anne had the accent and the role. She's keeping in practice, she says, with London shopping trips.
"I've fooled evry shopkeeper in town until we around to the bill," she laughed. "Then I have to empty my purse and say, 'Look, mister, is this enough money?' I can speak the accent, but I'll never understand English money."
Before completion of the film, in which she has four marriages and seven children, Anne will try marriage again. Hubby-to-be is MEl Brooks, the comedy writer she describes as "short, a little fat, not good looking at all, but beautiful."
As a Hollywood starlet 12 years ago she married a young attorney. When he sued her for divorce, she was shocked. "I thought I was happily married," she said at the time.
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