Word: actresses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From now on, there would always be the memory of the fear she experienced during her experiment with blindness. After weeks of work, Actress Bancroft was beginning to understand that last dimension of the role for which she was preparing. Already a part of her was onstage, creating with incredible vitality a superior human being: half-blind Anne Sullivan, whose stubborn skill lit up life itself for a deaf, blind and mute child named Helen Keller. Already, Anne Bancroft was The Miracle Worker of Playwright William Gibson's impressive new play (TIME...
...brief Bancroft career is a thunderous theatrical cliche. Even the name is a typical Hollywood banality: 28 years ago when she was born, Anne Bancroft was Anna Maria Italiano. She was the kid who scribbled on the back wall of her apartment house, "I want to be an actress," and who kept showing off for the handsome stranger whom she took...
...change from tenderness to humor to ferocity to sultriness with astonishing ease and conviction. Says her sometime acting coach, Herbert Berghof: "She is like a little daughter of Anna Magnani." In Miracle Worker, she is completely in charge of an extraordinarily demanding role, a role that requires of the actress what it required of Annie Sullivan in real life: the sensitivity of a poet and the strength of a piano mover. It is a role that is doubly difficult because it demands a violation of one of the prime commandments of theatrical experience: never get on stage for too long...
...cuts, bruises and a chipped tooth. Similar padding from ankle to bustle have not saved Anne from equally painful accidents. "The impulse during rehearsal," says Director Arthur Penn, "was to set the fight scene, to plan every move and response." But then he saw his stars at work. Once Actress Bancroft had persuaded Patty not to hold back ("Naw! You come on and hit me!"), the scrap quickly developed into impromptu reality, a little different every night. The big fight has run as briefly as 8 minutes 10 seconds; at its best, one night in Philadelphia, it lasted longer than...
...small, significant detail that transforms mimicry into understanding. So the coarse, curbside intonations of The Bronx were erased with intuitive skill at the flare of a footlight and the rise of a curtain. Seesaw's Gittel spoke with an inflection that convinced thousands of theatergoers that the actress must be Jewish ("I didn't even know what a Jew was until I was grown up," says Anne Bancroft). As Annie Sullivan, Actress Bancroft erases her Italian heritage so completely that, after seeing Miracle, Novelist Edwin (The Last Hurrah) O'Connor said: "This is the most astonishingly accurate...