Escaping Mrs. Robinson

“People don’t really have an idea of what I look like,” Anne Bancroft says, settling onto a sofa at the Regency Hotel. She’s wearing white pants and a white blouse and has the window open on one of the hottest days of the year because she’s cold.

“Did you know who I was when I came in the room?” she asks.

Yes.

“You did? I’m pretty hard to recognize, I think. Sometimes when I talk, people know who I am.”

They may, they may not. Certainly the voice has a rich, familiar husky quality. On the other hand, the woman who so brilliantly captured Southern California decadence and dissatisfaction 30 years ago in “The Graduate” occasionally tawks like dis. It’s not “picture” but “pictcha.” Not “spectacular” but “spectacula.”

“She’s made out of heavy-duty Bronx material,” says Arthur Penn, who directed Bancroft on Broadway in “Two for the Seesaw” and “The Miracle Worker” (the latter onscreen as well). “A kid off the streets, you know.”

If Bancroft, now 66, is unrecognizable, she has only herself to blame--although she’s not exactly complaining. First, she’s done very little press over the past 30 years. She says she did plenty when she was all the rage on Broadway in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

“And then I think after I met Mel, I just sort of backed off,” she says, referring to husband Mel Brooks, whom she met in 1961. “I was not interested in having my private life being talked about, scrutinized. Once my child was born, I really didn’t do much at all.”

Another reason she is unrecognizable is that “I change from movie to movie,” as she puts it. In other words, she’s an actress, a complicated one, capable of finding in herself qualities that she could use to play such disparate characters as the bohemian girl Gittel Mosca in “Seesaw” (which won her a Tony), the hard-headed teacher Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker” (Tony, Oscar) and the frosty Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate” (Oscar nomination). Not to mention an aging ballerina (“The Turning Point,” Oscar nomination), Golda Meir (“Golda,” Tony nomination) and a nun (“Agnes of God,” Oscar nomination).

“She can do anything,” Penn says. “She could play Queen Victoria in a minute. She’s a magnificent actress in every possible respect.”

The character that has most clung to Bancroft, of course, is Mrs. Robinson, who coldly seduces the son (played by Dustin Hoffman) of her husband’s business partner and was immortalized in Simon & Garfunkel’s song from the film. Images come to mind of Hoffman standing in a hotel room staring at Bancroft’s stockinged leg. Or her laugh as Hoffman says, “Mrs. Robinson--you’re trying to seduce me . . . aren’t you?”

To Bancroft’s way of thinking, audiences miss the point of Mrs. Robinson. She cites as an example the unscripted moment when Hoffman first awkwardly kisses her while she’s got a lungful of cigarette smoke. The scene is funny, but Bancroft says she had her mind on other things.

“What I was thinking at the time was how inadequate a kiss was for this woman,” she says. “That woman needed a lot more than a kiss. She was not after romance. She was after being devoured. To lose the terrible rage that she lived with, to turn it into something else.

“People see art on many, many levels,” Bancroft says. “And what the artist means may never be seen except by a handful of people, and the artist has to be content with that. In all the years I have been in the business, very few people understand what you’re doing on the levels that you’re doing them. No, of course nobody knows that about Mrs. Robinson. You don’t know it consciously.”

Having invested all of that in the role, Bancroft has spent the last 30 years trying to distance herself from it. It’s become something of an albatross.

“I’m still trying to get away from it,” she says 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. I think what made it popular was the fantasy of a young man to be taught how to do this.” “This,” of course, is sex.

When it is pointed out that over the years she has been allowed to play other parts, she replies, “Yeah, because I can. And I make sure that everybody knows I can by doing all those other roles.”

Though those opportunities have been more frequent in recent years--especially since her son, Maximillian, 25, is on his own and “my job as a mother was over,” she says--the parts and movies have been modest: “Home for the Holidays,” “How to Make an American Quilt,” “Mr. Jones,” “Malice.”

Now Bancroft is appearing in a big, brawny Hollywood movie, “G.I. Jane,” starring Demi Moore and directed by Ridley Scott. In the film, which opens Aug. 22, she plays a wily U.S. senator modeled after “a certain Texas governor,” whom Scott identifies as Ann Richards. Her character pushes Moore’s lieutenant into the Navy SEALs training program for political purposes but then finds her unexpected success politically inconvenient.

“You know, I have to be honest with you,” Bancroft says. “I liked it more than I expected to. I was really surprised at how good a movie it was. Not that I didn’t think it would be, but I know it had gone through a number of changes along the way.”

Among them was the title, which reportedly went from “G.I. Jane” to “Navy Cross” to “In Pursuit of Honor” and back to “G.I. Jane.”

“When there’s that kind of indecision, you get a little bit worried,” she says. “The original script was really quite wonderful. Interesting concept of this woman in combat and all that. But somewhere along the line I thought it might end up more of a man’s movie. But it isn’t. Women are interested too.”

“She’s brilliant,” Scott says of Bancroft. “One of those actresses who I never really had the opportunity to have the appropriate role for. When you’re about to work with someone you’ve always revered--I was nervous, actually. She was completely the most disarming actor I’ve worked with because she’s wonderfully constructive and got it immediately.”

It’s interesting to watch Bancroft in a movie like this, if only to see if she’ll get swallowed up by the technology and the production values. She does not. The rapid cutting and Venetian-blind lighting take a back seat to her character’s wit and wry awareness that she’s an aging woman operating in a man’s world. Bancroft says Scott drew pictures of the scenes as he was describing them so that she knew what he was driving at. Even so, she says she couldn’t dwell on the technical concerns of the director of such films as “Blade Runner” and “Alien.”

“The thing is, you can’t even think about it,” she says. “You just have to go with your own inner life because if you start to get involved in all of that, you lose what the scene really is about. You have to stay very connected to the actors who you’re playing with and very connected to what you’re doing. Because moviemaking is getting more like this, you have to be more concentrated.”

Ironically, Bancroft may be better equipped to handle these distractions than her younger colleagues because she was forged in that crucible of ‘50s acting, live television. Born and raised in the Bronx, she was christened Anna Maria Louisa Italiano but worked under the name Anne Marno and later took the name Bancroft from a list supplied by Darryl Zanuck. She got her start on such live TV shows as “Studio One.”

“That was hard as hell,” she says. “Because you had all the restrictions of a camera, which means that you’ve got to hit a mark and be in that light. And you also had the confinements of the stage where things took place on one set because in live TV you couldn’t walk the streets. And you had that time constriction, which means you had to do it like you would on a Broadway show. It had to be then, there, now. You couldn’t be distracted for a moment.

“I’m grateful for it. It was the greatest school that one could have gone to. You learn to be concentrated and focused.”

Initially, this did not do her any good in Hollywood. She signed a contract at Fox and spent five years (1952-57) grinding out a series of B-pictures with names like “Demetrius and the Gladiators” and “Gorilla at Large.”

Asked what she expected from the industry, Bancroft refreshingly does not go into a tirade about how her artistic ambitions were thwarted by Hollywood’s crass commercialism.

“My goal was simply to be a movie star,” she says. “I had no idea what to be an actress meant. It was just to be famous and popular and powerful and rich. Somewhere along the line I realized I wasn’t getting it and also whatever I did get was not satisfying and I wanted something else. I didn’t know what it was. But I think once I came back east and did ‘Two for the Seesaw,’ I began to know what I wanted. I really wanted to learn how to act.”

She credits Arthur Penn with teaching her how to do that, although he maintains that he merely unleashed what was already there. Having given up on Hollywood, she was starving for work and taking acting classes in New York when she got the part of Gittel Mosca. Her leading man was Henry Fonda.

“That’s a complicated subject,” says Bancroft, refusing to engage in platitudes about how wonderful it was to work with Fonda. “I’m saving that for writing that myself. That’s all I’m saying.”

Penn, however, is more forthcoming.

“Fonda had a way of working that was particularly sort of old movie star,” says the director, who is president of the prestigious Actors Studio. “What we call, those of us who practice the so-called Method, a kind of ‘result’ acting. Which is, he figures out how he wants it to be and then kind of saunters up to and takes the attitude. And we take it the other way around, which is we don’t know what it is to be but we search out the feelings and they eventuate in a certain kind of behavior. So there was a difference in approaches, and he had a hard time adjusting to both Annie and me. And he was not pleased. The hardest part of the show was trying to keep a lid on it.”

And keeping Bancroft, who was only in her late 20s at the time, from doubting herself. He succeeded, which not only ensured the play’s success and made Bancroft a star but also inspired its playwright, William Gibson, to write a play for her--”The Miracle Worker.” He adapted it from a television show Penn had done about Annie Sullivan’s extraordinary efforts to reach the blind, deaf and speechless Helen Keller.

This too was a success, and fortunately we have a record of the performances on celluloid, directed by Penn, with the play’s two principals, Patty Duke and Bancroft, in place. What’s still striking after all these years is the fierce battle for control between these two willful characters, especially a crucial scene where Annie tries to teach Helen table manners. It’s a cat fight.

“I was young, very young,” says Bancroft, explaining how she was able to do it eight times a week onstage. “And let me tell you something, Patty kept growing, so she was getting heavier and bigger, and I got so strong by the end of that run. I did it a year and four months, lifting and slamming her. I got hurt once, and that was during rehearsal. I got a big bone bruise in my foot, and she chipped a tooth.”

It was around this time that Bancroft met Brooks, who at that point was a struggling writer. He had accompanied a mutual friend to the set of a Perry Como TV special, where Bancroft was singing and dancing with Como and Jimmy Durante.

“There was Mel,” Bancroft says simply. “And I have seen him every day since.”

Well, not every day. She works, he works, but they made a pact that neither of them would do a big job at the same time. With that refreshing candor of hers, Bancroft admits that sometimes they’ve been competitive, “but I think we manage it maturely.

“Especially after our child came, I really did take a back seat and I was going to raise that child,” she says. “And at the moment when I became pregnant, Mel was writing ‘Blazing Saddles,’ so it really worked out beautifully. His career sort of went forward [in the early ‘70s] and he could take care us, me and my little baby.”

She says she doesn’t regret mothering more and acting less.

“If I resent anything, it was that I would find something that I would want to do and have to leave my home,” she says. “During the time of Maximilian’s growing up, I did about one project a year. Before he went to school, he came with me wherever I went. Once he went to school, then I really had to cut it down to be available. You have to make those kinds of compromises. But that’s who I am. Other people might not have to make those deals.”

It probably helped that at the time she was in her 40s. Another concession Bancroft has had to make, of course, is to age. She’s not a leading lady anymore but a character actress: Harvey Fierstein’s kvetchy mother in “Torch Song Trilogy,” the angry, pot-smoking aunt in “How to Make an American Quilt.” Often, a place where such actresses can flourish is TV, and she’s been offered a number of series over the years--”from parts like ‘The Miracle Worker’ to Mrs. Robinson and everything in between,” she says.

In fact she did a short one in England, called “Max and Freddie” to see if she’d like it. She did, but not enough.

“I really need my freedom,” she says.

“Why would you want to pin yourself down to one character? If I couldn’t try those other parts of myself, look for them and express them, there would seem to me no reason to be an actress.”

In October, Bancroft will be starting a long-dreamed-of project called “The Annihilation Fish,” starring Danny Glover and directed by Charles Burnett. She plays a hallucinating woman who’s in love with Puccini. At Christmas she will be appearing in a reworking of “Great Expectations” for Fox with Robert De Niro, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke.

“She’s quite exceptional,” she says of Paltrow, who may prove to have Bancroft’s acting range. Without prompting, she adds, “I’m sorry about the recent breakup [with Brad Pitt]. She was so in love with him--it seemed, anyway. Although I never met him, she talked about him a great deal and sort of made everybody happy, this lovely, budding love affair between these two bright, talented people.”

The phone rings, and Bancroft gets up uncertainly. If it’s who she thinks it is, she doesn’t want to take the call in here. An assistant comes in saying it’s her husband. She disappears for a few minutes and then returns to say goodbye.

“Feel my hands,” Bancroft says conversationally. “Aren’t they cold?”

They are. But they’re the only part of her that is.