Word: bancroft
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Somehow, the fresh and volatile Bancroft talent carries extra surprise, for the 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...
...behind the footlights, Anne Bancroft is always the serious, controlled artist, whose features can 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...
...Anne Bancroft, as Annie Sullivan, comes onstage in her drab grey traveling suit and black, high-laced shoes. The stiff back, the solemn, measured steps are at once determined and shy. It is the hard-jawed fighter who meets her charge for the first time and all but devours the child with her eyes. It is the troubled stranger, caught suddenly between youthful belligerence and a growing awareness of responsibility, who catches a doll full in the mouth, spits a broken tooth into her cupped palm, agonizes over a job she may not be able to handle...
...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...
Italian from Galway. What Anne Bancroft nightly brings to Annie Sullivan, besides sheer physical stamina, is an extraordinary talent for observation, an ear and an eye for the 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...