Word: bancrofts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...York City. Billie Holiday once encouraged her to try singing and gave her the name of an agent. Reiner didn't think she was "special enough" to be a singer. Instead, she became a painter so she could work at home while raising children. In 1980 Anne Bancroft, a friend, gave her a small role in the film Fatso. "I took some classes in acting. I studied with Lee Strasberg and other people," Reiner says. "But I realized what I really knew how to do is sing...
...written passages by which everything that followed would be measured. But such an ability was the last thing the American public expected from the obscure prairie lawyer who took office just four years earlier. "We have a President without brains," wrote the country's leading historian, George Bancroft. Bancroft was, admittedly, a Democrat, but many self-respecting Republicans were also concerned about the implications of having an untried, self-educated "rail splitter" as a leader in time of grave national crisis. Charles Francis Adams, a leading Republican and the son and grandson of Presidents, wrote of the new President-elect...
...considerable strength and the ultimate limitation of Agnes of God that it gives nearly equal time to each point of view. The believer is Mother Miriam Ruth (Anne Bancroft), head of a convent of cloistered nuns, whose young charge Sister Agnes (Meg Tilly) has been accused of strangling with its umbilical cord a baby to whom she had secretly given birth. The troubled cynic is Martha Livingston (Jane Fonda), a lapsed-Catholic psychiatrist determined to discover if Agnes is mad or a murderer, a harlot or a modern saint. The outsider is the moviegoer, who can have a pretty grand...
...goes for narrative suspense and coherence over emotional jolts, so now Agnes is merely first among equals. All three stars do smart, honorable work: Tilly, her childlike faith traumatized by the rude stirrings of womanhood; Fonda, the reluctant exorcist fiercely questioning her old God and, no less, herself; and Bancroft, a strict but up-to-date nun, with reserves of iron and irony...
...Bancroft got to exercise her hauteur in a few later films (The Turning Point, Agnes of God), but her longest and most piquant role was as wife, muse and keeper of Mel Brooks. They made an implausible, endearing couple: the crazy Brooklyn boy and the Bronx girl who, when they let her, could work miracles. --By Richard Corliss