Anne Bancroft

Bancroft, a student of acclaimed acting instructor Lee Strasberg, earned another Tony Award a few short years later for her role in The Miracle Worker. Bancroft portrayed Anne Sullivan, who taught a young mute and blind girl name Helen Keller. Bancroft reprised her role for the big screen adaptation, as did Patty Duke, who played Keller. Duke and Bancroft both netted Academy Awards for the 1962 Miracle Worker film. In the cultural zeitgeist, just one role eclipses that of Sullivan in Bancroft’s repertoire; in 1967, she played Mrs. Robinson in director Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. Much of the movie’s premise centers on Robinson engaging in an extramarital affair with a much younger Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate (in reality, Braddock actor Dustin Hoffman was just under six years younger than 35-year-old Bancroft; Katharine Ross, who played daughter Elaine Robinson, was eight years Bancroft’s junior). In a 1997 profile in the Los Angeles Times, contributor John Clark commentated that the role of the dissatisfied, married Robinson had “become something of an albatross” to the woman who brought her to life. “I’m still trying to get away from it,” she said, with Clark qualifying that Bancroft said this without bitterness. “Just yesterday I was walking down the street and a woman said to me, ‘You are Mrs. Robinson, no?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ They use that name instead of mine. If it’s shown on television, I get a whole new crop of young men [interested in the character].