Word: seesawed
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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...
...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 Sullivan, Actress Bancroft erases her Italian heritage so completely that, after seeing...
...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 off, scratching my foot," she recalls...
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...
...first," recalls Director Penn of the Seesaw rehearsal, "she could hardly find the stage. She couldn't stand. She couldn't turn. She'd play with her back to the audience. She was too broad and too vulgar. Even the lawyers and agents connected with the show said, 'She's no good; dump her.' " But Penn had already recognized something Anne's critics had not: she took direction admirably. "I even had to tell her where the jokes were, but once was enough." On the road Gibson would "write a funny line...