In addition to proving her mettle on Broadway, Bancroft reprised her role in the 1962 film version of "The Miracle Worker." Her extensive preparation -- a Bancroft trademark -- together with the time she spent inhabiting the character onstage (nearly a year and a half by the time shooting started in the summer of 1961) made for a triumphant return to film. Bancroft's Annie Sullivan approaches Helen Keller (Patty Duke) with an almost ferocious desire to break through, to show her that things have names and those names are strung together to express ideas, to help her see the connections between the physical world around her and the world she inhabits in her mind.
When Helen's older half-brother, James, tells Annie, "Maybe she'll teach you ... that there's such a thing as dullness of heart, acceptance and letting go. Sooner or later we all give up, don't we?" Bancroft replies, "Maybe you all do. It's my idea of the original sin," and you can't help but get the sense that Bancroft is saying those words for herself, as well as for the character.
"Most of Annie Sullivan is myself," Bancroft told Time while on Broadway. "It's my own blindness I draw on, my unawareness of myself." If she was drawing on herself in playing Sullivan, then the battle scene serves as proof of director Arthur Penn's thoughts about Bancroft at the end of filming. He told reporters, "You have to understand, you see, that Annie's a very gutsy girl. I swear I wouldn't hesitate to put her in at shortstop for the New York Yankees." The following spring, that gutsy performance brought Bancroft the Academy Award.
Within just a few years, she had made the giant leap from a B-movie starlet without many prospects in Hollywood to a Tony- and Oscar-winning actress whose face had graced the cover of Time. After "The Miracle Worker," Bancroft starred in the 1964 film "The Pumpkin Eater" (written by Harold Pinter and based on the Penelope Mortimer novel), for which she received her second Oscar nomination. In 1965, she played opposite Sidney Poitier in Sydney Pollock's "The Slender Thread." And in 1966, she replaced Patricia Neal (who had suffered a stroke) in "7 Women," which would be director John Ford's last feature film.
But the project for which Bancroft is best known is Mike Nichols' "The Graduate," released in 1967. Although she loved the script immediately, she was discouraged from taking the part of Mrs. Robinson by nearly everyone, because it was, they thought, beneath her. But the naysayers didn't succeed in convincing Bancroft that she shouldn't play Mrs. Robinson (as she told Charlie Rose, "Besides, there was nobody else who could play that part like I did"), and a legendary character was born.
It is at the graduation party thrown for Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) by his Beverly Hills socialite parents that the camera lights upon Mrs. Robinson for the first time. While the Braddocks' friends swarm around Ben, telling him, and each other, how "proud, proud, proud, proud, proud, proud, proud" they are of the track star, Mrs. Robinson sits alone, with a cigarette, watching like a leopard in wait. When Benjamin breaks, heading for his room, she goes in for the kill, but in a slow, methodical way -- staying one step ahead of him at each turn in their conversation, cutting him off before he can say no (and ignoring him when he does) and eventually luring him into her lair.
It would have been easy for Mrs. Robinson to come off as a one-dimensional seductress, leaving Benjamin with no alternative but to play the part of the victim -- a horny victim, but a victim nonetheless. Instead, Bancroft brings to her character a life not explicitly spelled out in the script -- and, in so doing, extends that multidimensionality to every other major character in the film.
In the end, the notorious Mrs. Robinson was, Bancroft told Rose, misunderstood: "She was not understood by herself, and she was also not understood by the society around her. I think she had dreams, and the dreams could not be fulfilled because of things that had happened. And so she spent a very conventional life, with this conventional man, in a conventional house. ... And meantime, all the dreams that she had had for herself, and the talent -- she probably was a gifted artist ... I thought that she was -- and none of that could happen anymore." In the film, Bancroft communicates this message, in its entirety, in the span of less than a minute. Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin are in bed, and Ben asks her what her college major was. With her back to him, she says one word -- "art" -- but a look of sadness and vulnerability washes over her face.
"I guess you kinda lost interest in it over the years then," Ben says.
"Kind of," she replies.
As is so often the case in "The Graduate," Bancroft communicates more in saying nothing at all than most actors could say with an entire monologue. That one scene, in which she goes on to laugh with Ben and then seconds later grabs him by the hair and forbids him to see her daughter, defines the character. With her eyes alone, Bancroft gives voice to the fear we all have: that we'll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we'd do and become will never come to be -- and that we're ordinary because of it.
Next page: She has become the actress people go to when they want a woman over 60 who's still got it