Word: bancrofts
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...svelte leg made an inverted V, framing poor Benjamin Braddock. Against the bleak will of such a woman, the young man was no match--just a light lunch for the spider queen. That seduction scene from The Graduate showed the uses to which ANNE BANCROFT, 73, who died last week of uterine cancer, could apply her fierce intelligence and bold sexuality. As the predatory mother figure Mrs. Robinson, Bancroft (though she was only six years older than her co-star Dustin Hoffman) created a Francis Bacon portrait of brains gone to waste, and lust as idle combat...
Smart and stinging--that was Bancroft at her best. Born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano, she was groomed as a standard babe when Hollywood signed her at 20. It was like fitting a firestorm for a corset. She returned to New York City, and in 1958 became a Broadway star as the spirited Gittel in William Gibson's Two for the Seesaw. The next year she found her great role, as Annie Sullivan, the half-blind teacher of the blind and deaf Helen Keller, in Gibson's The Miracle Worker. Bancroft's ferocity, starkly colliding and beautifully meshing with Patty Duke...
...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
...young man's anomic dalliance with his girlfriend's mom, got mistaken for 1967's feel-good romance (and its sardonic theme song for a love song). It's better seen as New York City's joke on the California dream, by stage veterans Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft and director Mike Nichols. The film caps its triumphal happy ending by having its lovers stare into the future and the suburban, plastic life yawning at them. THE WILD RIDE He was just 23 in 1960, but Jack Nicholson had already perfected the Jack Nicholson attitude: the bedroom eyes, the insult...
...trying to expose. In an early scene, smugglers are shown flying aliens into the country; when the Feds close in on them, they jettison their human payload. (An identical scene appears two years later in Secret Service of the Air, the first in Ronald Reagan's Brass Bancroft series.) Wong turns globe-trotting sleuth to learn the identity of the smugglers' Mr. Big (who turns out to be a Mrs.) and is nearly gang-raped on slave ship of illegal immigrants. When four guys fight in a dispute over her honor, she stands by, paralyzed. Scriptwriters, who didn't have...