Word: first
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Unlocking a Mind. That haunting effect begins with the eerie, keening scream of the infant Helen Keller's mother (Patricia Neal) when she discovers that her child is deaf and blind. It is warmed by the first sound of the soft, self-assured brogue of Annie Sullivan arriving from Boston to take charge of Helen. It is nourished by the overwhelming urgency of Annie's every action, her passionate need to dispense with the amenities-and with the Keller family's sentimental softness-in order to get down to the awful business of unlocking a darkened human...
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...
...amateur production of Night Must Fall, her Aunt Kate yelled terrifyingly from the back of the hall: "I'm going to tell your mother!" Sometimes, Annie revolted against such domination; once she grabbed her mother's modest jewelry and sold it for pennies to the first comers in the street...
...tested an aspiring actor named Doug Rogers, and Anne agreed to help him out by playing opposite. Result: no one noticed Rogers (says Anne: "I don't know where the kid is now"), but Fox signed Anne. Of course Mamma went along to Hollywood-on Anne's first plane ride. She had to see her daughter settled in a small Sunset Boulevard apartment before she felt it safe to return to Macy...
...last, Anna Maria Louise Italiano chose the Hollywood name, Anne Bancroft, from a list handed out by Darryl Zanuck; it was the only name, she thought, that "did not sound like I should look like Lana Turner." Hollywood historians remember her first movie, Don't Bother to Knock, chiefly because it was the first big role for a future star named Marilyn Monroe. Anne Bancroft was just an added starter...