There are people you're just glad are there. You may not think of them often, but it's always a pleasure to be reminded of their existence, and of the sort of bedrock satisfaction it gives you even when you're not thinking about them. Sometimes you only know who these people were when they're suddenly cut from beneath your feet, and as you get that falling feeling, you realize you'd stupidly relied on their always being there.
Anne Bancroft was one of those, for me. She died yesterday in New York, of uterine cancer, at the age of 73, widowing Mel Brooks -- if you can imagine a more piteously incongruous oxymoron. Who even knew she was ill? (I guess it should have been a warning when she had to bow out of Edward Albee's 2002 play about Louise Nevelson, "The Occupant," because of pneumonia. Having known Nevelson, and helped her assistant Diana MacKown put together Nevelson's interview-memoir, Dawns + Dusks, I was bitterly disappointed not to see that one. Louise was both shy and imperial, and Bancroft was the one to play her.) I'm only a low-grade fan, and I feel shocked and robbed and indignant. I loved her raspy, cynical voice and wised-up womanhood, and savored her arch, knowing presence even in a potboiler like "Point of No Return."
Of course she was powerfully moving in "The Miracle Worker," and outrageous in "The Graduate." She played Mrs. Robinson with such shameless relish. The woman was a monster, but an attractive monster, so much more unforgettable than her greeting-card daughter. If you were around 20 when you saw the movie, it was the first surprising promise that life wasn't going to end at 40.
But the performance of hers that burned her permanently into my awareness was "The Turning Point." I don't remember the details, just the impact. She was stunning as the aging ballerina who had chosen art over family life, with such regret and exultation, such gain and loss. As someone so torn between those two choices that I would end up with neither, I felt drawn and quartered by that movie in a blessedly painful way. (In real life, of course, Bancroft had both: her son is Maximilian Brooks.)
Anne Bancroft, born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano, was supposed to be around into her 90s, dammit. She would have brought such kick-ass class to the role of a really old lady. Ah, poor Mel and Max.
- amba
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