Anne Bancroft, 1931 - 2005.

Anne Bancroft, who won the 1962 best actress Oscar as the teacher of a young Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker but achieved greater fame as the seductive Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, has died. She was 73. She died of cancer on Monday at Mount Sinai Hospital, John Barlow, a spokesman for her husband, Mel Brooks.

The AP's Dino Hazell.

William Gibson put it this way: "More happens in her face in 10 seconds than happens in most women's faces in 10 years." ... She was more interested in performance than theory, although she was a member of the Actors Studio early in her career. The actor Rod Steiger once gave her a copy of Stanislavsky's writings on acting. "I still have it," she said some years later, "but I've never read it." The landmarks in Ms Bancroft's acting life were, unquestionably, the two Gibson plays and The Graduate.

Robert Berkvist in the New York Times.

Updates: "The acting profession lost one of its finest," writes Nikke Finke for the LA Weekly. "But Hollywood has lost something even more precious: a role model."

David Edelstein at Slate: "[S]he was a casualty of her best role... her performance was so indelible that it became difficult for audiences (or studio executives) to see her as anything but 'the older woman'... My favorite moment is her saddest, when, after professing ignorance about (and indifference to) a work of art, she admits, with a faraway look (but no evident self-pity) that her major in college was 'art history.' She has so much more stature than the self-centered protagonist."

Elisabeth Kuball, who wrote a longish profile of Anne Bancroft for Salon back in 2001, reflects on how her interest in the actress nudged her own life in a different direction.

George Fasel: "The depth and texture of Bancroft's best work makes a great deal of what passes for acting throughout the length of her career pale.  She was a dedicated artist with the talent to match her devotion to her work; not many of those around."

Posted by dwhudson at June 7, 2005 3:57 PM