|
Magazine: RadioTimes (british)
Date: 19-25 November, 1994
Article: Adrew Duncan Interview with Anne Bancroft
By: Andrew Duncan
She is supposed to be one of Hollywood's last prima donnas, Garbo-esque in her hatred
of publicity ("It's so embarrassing to talk about yourself," she explains), the woman who
silenced Terry Wogan by saying she didn't enjoy talking to him. But here we are, in what seems
like an insubstantial pre-fab on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles, where her husband
of 30 years, Mel Brooks, has his office. She is friendly, laughing, elegant ina brown trouser
suit, with her greying hair scraped back and scant make-up to camouflage the lines of 63
years. She clutches a bottle from which she sips occasionally. It has "Miracle Water" printed
on the label. "I work out every day and this contains electrolytes which return potassium to
the body." She chats about everything from her psychiatrist, her disastrous first marriage,
motherhood and the "empty nest" syndrome. Is she really difficult, I wonder? Her dark brown
eyes widen as she replies, with a grin, "Sounds like me, but I really haven't the faintest
idea. I often think I am, but people I ask say I'm not. Maybe I'm just asking the wrong
people."
It is a busy time. Her housekeeper of many years is about to have an operation, her
husband needs extensive dental work, her 22-year-old son, Max, is about to go to film school
and she is making two movies in quick succession. "I'm going to be inaccessible to my family
and I know they'll need me, but I don't want to be needed at the moment. I must concentrate
on my work, and to do that I have to be selfish. My husband [she never once refers to him as
Mel] usually takes care of things for me, but he is working so hard. I'm in a bit of a pickle,
as they say." So the family will play second fiddle for a while, I suggest. "I didn't say
that," she admonishes. "Keeping the home is the most important work in the world, and if I
thought of it as second fiddle I wouldn't do it. It's not only first fiddle, it's the
composer, conductor, the whole orchestra. Why? Because we got along for thousands of years
without businesses made by men, without movies, but you can never do without the cave, the
home, the fire, the meals. Those are the basic things that women care about and organise."
Then why not be just a wife and mother? "Well, along comes and play like The
Mother and I couldn't turn it down. It's tough to find that kind of material, and when
you do, you have to grab it, no matter what they're paying." Written by Paddy Chayefsky in
1954, it's about an Irish widow in New York who wants to return to work after 38 years,
rather than lose her independence by living with her married daughter. "Women anywhere in
the world will understand. It's a terrible dilemma. Why don't men live longer? They should
stop working so hard, but someone has to earn the living. Maybe in future there will be
something wonderful -- like husbands and wives each making money for half the time. But has
the family unit ever been perfect, exept on television, where they seem able to solve
everything in half and hour? That's why they're so popular. They lull you into a fantasy
world."
Maybe, she muses family life -- society even -- is beginning to break down, which
could -- she's an optomist, she says -- lead to an improvement. "There is a time when
everything looks murky and confused. You go into a role with gusto and it all breaks down
before it can be built up again. It's the same in teenage years, where the child breaks down
so the adult can emerge. Even in good marriages there is inevitable breakdown, and that's the
time you have to work before it gets better. It's probably true of countries and family units.
They break down in the process of growing and improving."
She has specialised in playing mothers, it seems, ever since the rapacious Mrs.
Robinson who set teenage boys a-quiver by seducing her friend's son (Dustin Hoffman) in
The Graduate .. 27 years ago. She was a middle-class British mother in The Pumpkin
Eater and fiesty Jewish mama in Torch Song Trilogy. "There's not much else for
women my age. Accually, there's very little that women do in real life exept be mothers."
She's been in therapy to help overcome the loss she felt when Max, a college graduate
applying to film schools, started to become independent. "I found myself tearful much of the
time. What tears mothers apart is they lose their main job, which is to help. It's painful to
let children go into this dangerous, dangerous world and I'm still finding it so. My husband
went to the grocery store with him for the first time the other day and it was a big eye-opener.
He was astonished and proud that Max knew what he wanted and where to get it, yet he felt
torn because he thought he was still 'my little boy'. Think of the bird kicking the baby out
of the nest." She pauses, sips her Miracle Water, and laughs, "I don't think birds feel as
conflicted as I did, though."
It's the one regret of her life, she adds, that she didn't have more children. "We
tried and tried, and suddenly had Max when I was 41, the last possible moment. We should have
called him 'Nick' for 'in the nick of time'. I was at the peak of my career and my looks, but
I pulled back. I wanted to be with him. One of the perks of show business, a reason we go into
it, is we don't have to work every day -- especially women. When you become a wife there are
certain demands put on you. Work is important for a man's identity. It's not that important to
women. They have a choice." Very unfashionable, I say. What about new man, sharing and all that?
"Perhaps if I had a new man could. But I don't. I have an old-fashioned guy and I
find keeping the home a very strong mandate. I also must act, and both roles have to be
juggled. At times the struggle is oppressive, but I have to solve it. Some women feel guilty
about not having a job, and that isn't fair. You have to go ahead and try everything for
yourself. No one can make an intellectual choice -- 'I'm going to work for the rest of my
life,' or 'I'm going to stop when I'm 35 and have a family.' You have to live and let life
help you make these choices." Her motto, which she once had embroidered on her son's t-shirt,
is "Inch by inch, life's a cinch; yard by yard it's very hard."
Brought up as Anna Maria Italiano in a provincial Catholic family in the Bronx, one
of three daughters of immigrant Italians, she always knew she wanted to perform, and was
encouraged by her mother, a switchboard operator with aspirations to be a teacher or an
actress. "She dared to dream for me, and I dared to make her dreams come true. Even as a
baby, adults put me on a picnic table and asked me to sing and dance." At 9, she scrawled "I
want to be an actress" on the wall of the apartment where she lived. There was a hiccup at 17
when she enrolled in college to become a laboratory assistant. "I was madly in love with a
young man who planned that at his career, so I thought I'd do the same. Here I was about to
give up all my dreams for a hormone. Then mother took over, thank goodness, and in a quiet
way manipulated me into drama school." After that it was Hollywood, a 19-year-old ingenue
with stars in her eyes, whose name was changed by Daryl Zanuck snf who made films such as
Gorilla at Large and The Girl in Black Stockings. "I thought that to have my
name on the screen was 'it'. I didn't realise there were further, better dreams. At that time
all I wanted was to walk around in fox furs and satin dresses and go to premieres."
But the image was false. Outwardly gregarious and soignee, she was so lonely she went
up to a woman at a party and asked her, "Please be my friend." She recalls, "I knew she was
the kind of self-assured person I could be friends with. I still have complex insecurities,
things which make me angry, fearful, guilty and ashamed. I guess being in touch with your
feelings is very important to an actress."
Desperate for companionship in those early Hollywood days, she says she would have
married "almost anyone" and settled in 1953, for a Texas businessman, Marty May. "I knew at
the ceremony itself I was marrying for the wrong reasons. It was the most auful feeling. Why
did I go through it? I don't know. Fear of backing out, of looking like a fool. After the
wedding I monogrammed everything I owned because I was convinced I'd never marry again and
was determined to keep my own initials." The marriage soon broke up and she returned to New
York. Several relationships followed, and failed. "I won't say I went a bit wild. I was a
rather good girl for most of my life, exept when I wasn't. And then I was a bad girl. I've
had my moments. But I felt everything before and after my first marriage was junk, and I had
a real fear of men. I was incapable of loving them and they thought they couldn't love me."
Psychoanalysis was a help until, at 30, she met Mel Brooks on a TV programme and told her
analyst, "Let's speed up the process. I've met the right man."
By then she was also one of America's most accomplished stage actresses, having
become an instant success on Broadway as a frustrated Jewish dancer in Two for the
Seesaw with Henry Fonda ("I didn't learn what a real actress was until then"), followed
by Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, later made into a film which won her an Oscar.
She doesn't plan to return to the theatre, she says. "When I realised Max was going to leave
home I thought I'd have to make my own separate way too, so I decided to explore my acting
and did a short theatre season in LA, but the life was awful. I couldn't see my friends, or
my family. The only time I was happy was when I was on stage. There's nothing better in the
whole world than the neccessity to be concentrated like that for two and a half hours, but
although I love the theatre I don't love it enough to give up a very important part of my
life."
What next? "I have the perfect dream -- to live four months in LA, four in New York,
and four in the Caribbean or Miami. I'd like my husband to come along, so I'll wait until he
decides what he's going to do with his life. Accually, I don't think he'll decide. Life will
decide for him. It always takes care of itself."
|