US: 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 uterine cancer on Monday at Mount Sinai Hospital, John Barlow, a spokesman for her husband, actor and director Mel Brooks, said yesterday.
Bancroft was awarded the Tony for creating the role on Broadway of poor-sighted Annie Sullivan, the teacher of the deaf and blind Keller. She repeated her portrayal in the film version.
Yet despite her Academy Award and four other nominations, The Graduate overshadowed her other achievements.
Bancroft's beginnings in Hollywood were unimpressive. She was signed by 20th Century-Fox in 1952 and given the glamour treatment.
She had been acting in television as Anne Marno, but it sounded too ethnic for movies. The studio gave her a choice of names; she picked Bancroft "because it sounded dignified".
After a series of B pictures, she escaped to Broadway in 1958 and won her first Tony opposite Henry Fonda in Two for the Seesaw. The stage and movie versions of The Miracle Worker followed.
In 2003 Bancroft admitted that nearly everyone discouraged her from undertaking the role of Mrs Robinson "because it was all about sex with a younger man".