Word: gittel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Beginning of an Era. Even for the vast and vocal audience that recognized the Bancroft talent two years ago in Gibson's Two for the Seesaw, this season's Bancroft is a stunning spectacle. As Gittel Mosca, the heartbroken Bronx-to-Bohemia hoyden of Seesaw, the young star still had an uncertain luster. There was a feeling that perhaps the black-stockinged beatnik was only playing herself. What would happen if she really...
...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 Sullivan, Actress Bancroft erases her Italian heritage so completely that, after seeing Miracle, Novelist Edwin (The Last...
...After six years, Hollywood was beginning to pall in other ways, too. "The studios wanted to give me the Monroe-type sex buildup," she says. "I wanted to develop my acting, not my body." When TV Actor Richard Basehart recommended Anne to Producer Fred Coe as an ideal Gittel for Two for the Seesaw, Anne was only too anxious to try. She was going East for a sister's wedding anyway; she read the play and decided that she would impress Coe, not by acting, but by being Gittel. "I made sure he found me with one shoe...
...GITTEL LIVES, wired Coe to Director Arthur Penn in Hollywood. Next day Playwright William Gibson was equally convinced. Anne was Gittel for him too. "So how was the Coast?" she greeted him. "Lousy, huh?" The Seesaw team, which had already signed Henry Fonda for the male lead, had found its real star...
Perhaps more revealing than this sort of couch talk are some lines that Playwright William Gibson wrote into Seesaw while the show was trying out on the road. The middleaged, Midwestern lawyer tells Gittel: "I said [you are] a beautiful girl; I didn't mean skin-deep-there you're a delight. Anyone can see. And underneath is a street brawler. That some can see. But under the street brawler is something as fresh and crazy and timid as a colt." And that, right now, is probably as good a description of Anna Maria Italiano...