Bancroft received a second nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Pumpkin Eater (1964).[17] Bancroft achieved stardom when she played the starring role as Mrs. Robinson in the romantic comedy-drama The Graduate (1967).[18] In the film, she played an unhappily married woman who seduces the son of her husband's business partner, the much younger recent college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman.[17] In the film, Hoffman's character later dates and falls in love with her daughter.[18] Bancroft was ambivalent about her appearance in The Graduate; she said in several interviews that the role overshadowed her other work. Despite her character becoming an archetype of the "older woman" role, Bancroft was only 36 years old at the time—just eight years older than her onscreen daughter Katharine Ross and six years older than Hoffman. The film, and her performance, received widespread critical acclaim, earning her a third nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. A CBS television special, Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man (1970), won Bancroft an Emmy Award for her singing and acting.[19]
Bancroft is one of ten actors to have won both an Academy Award and a Tony Award for the same role (as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker),[20] and one of very few entertainers to win an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony award. This rare achievement is also known as the Triple Crown of Acting. She followed that success with a second television special, Annie and the Hoods (1974), which was telecast on ABC and featured her husband Mel Brooks as a guest star.[21] She made an uncredited cameo in the film Blazing Saddles (1974), directed by Brooks. She made a career comeback with the ballet drama The Turning Point (1977), followed by the neo-noir mystery film Agnes of God (1985), which earned her two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress.[22][23]
Bancroft made her debut as a screenwriter and director in Fatso (1980), in which she starred with Dom DeLuise.[24]
Bancroft also starred in several television movies and miniseries, receiving six Emmy Award nominations (winning once for herself and shared for Annie, The Women in the Life of a Man),[30][31] eight Golden Globe nominations (winning twice)[32] and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. Her last appearance was as herself in a 2004 episode of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm.[33] She was cast in Spanglish (2004) later in the year, but had to bow out due to a medical emergency.[34] Her last project was the animated feature film Delgo, released posthumously in 2008.[35] The film was dedicated to her.
Bancroft's first husband was lawyer Martin May, of Lubbock, Texas. They married on July 1, 1953, separated in November 1955, and divorced on February 13, 1957.[1][39] She had previously been engaged to actor John Ericson in 1951.[40]Lee Marvin's ex-wife Betty claimed in her 2010 book Tales of a Hollywood Housewife that Marvin had an affair with Bancroft when they co-starred in Gorilla at Large (1954) and A Life in the Balance (1955).[41]
In 1961, Bancroft met Mel Brooks at a rehearsal for Perry Como's variety show Kraft Music Hall. Bancroft and Brooks married on August 5, 1964, at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau near New York City Hall, and were married until her death in 2005. Their son, Max Brooks, was born in 1972.[42][43] Bancroft worked with her husband three times on the screen: dancing a tango in Brooks's Silent Movie (1976), in his remake of To Be or Not to Be (1983)[10] and in the episode titled "Opening Night" (2004) of the HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm.[33] The couple also appeared in Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995),[10] but never appeared together again. Brooks produced the film The Elephant Man (1980), in which Bancroft acted. He was executive producer for the film 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) in which she starred. Both Brooks and Bancroft appeared in Season 6 of The Simpsons. According to the DVD commentary, when Bancroft came to record her lines for the episode "Fear of Flying", the Simpsons writers asked if Brooks had come with her (which he had); she joked, "I can't get rid of him!"
In a 2010 interview, Brooks credited Bancroft as being the guiding force behind his involvement in developing The Producers and Young Frankenstein for the musical theater. In the same interview, he said of their first meeting in 1961, "From that day, until her death on June 6, 2005, we were glued together."[44] Bancroft's son, Max, said in a 2020 interview that she was "a secret, closet scientist". He said that, as a child, she read to him Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters (1926) as a bedtime story.[45]
In 2005, shortly before her death, Bancroft became a grandmother when her daughter-in-law Michelle had a boy, Henry Michael Brooks.[46] Bancroft had a drinking problem which resulted in being absent from work often, according to Elizabeth Wilson, who was Bancroft's understudy in The Little Foxes and co-starred with her in The Graduate (1967) and The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975).[47]
Death
Bancroft died of uterine cancer at age 73 on June 6, 2005, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.[48] Her death surprised many, including some of her friends, as the intensely private Bancroft had not disclosed any details of her illness.[49] Her body was interred at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York near her father, Michael Italiano, and her mother, Mildred Italiano (who died five years after Anne in April 2010).[50] Her final film, Delgo, was dedicated to her memory.
^Frank Northen Magill (October 1, 1987). Magill's Cinema Annual: 1987. Gale. ISBN978-0-89356-406-3. Retrieved December 3, 2011. ...Anne Bancroft, one of the world's most respected and versatile actresses...
^Willis, John A.; Barry Monush, eds. (2005). Screen World 2004. Vol. 55. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books. p. 7. ISBN9781557836397. OCLC56656049. An impassioned, clever, and gifted actress who has been equally brilliant in both drama and comedy, emerging as one of the most enduring and respected performers of her generation.
