Embracing Complexity

“The women I play are always complex,” Anne Bancroft explains conspiratorially over a plate of pasta as she talks about the soignee ‘30s-era socialite she plays in her latest film, “Up at the Villa.” “I don’t select to play a woman unless I can feel her complexities,” and that’s something the still-glamorous 68-year-old star finds in Philip and Belinda Haas’ adaptation of a Somerset Maugham novella.

“You see, La Principessa wants very much to support the lies she’s telling herself--that she and her little group are still the center of things. And the more power Hitler and Mussolini get, the more she needs to support those lies, because they’re harder to believe. So when Mary, the woman Kristin Scott Thomas plays, tells her she’s engaged to a man who might one day be the governor of Bengal, that’s a very powerful position. The Principessa would love to be associated with it. So as she’s talking to Mary about how ‘you’ll take a lover,’ and so forth, she thinks she’s going to be her mentor. But after Mary gets into that awful scandal, and ruins any chance of her staying in the group, La Principessa turns on her. And what she’s really saying is, ‘I never revealed a thing to you. I never really told you any truth. So don’t think you have anything on me!’ ”

Nobody has anything on Anne Bancroft, especially when it comes to turning a supporting role into a full-press star turn. Her La Principessa in this stylish romantic drama is just the latest addition to a gallery of portraits that already includes “Torch Song Trilogy,” “The Elephant Man” and “Garbo Talks.” And those are just the supporting parts. Her leading roles include “The Turning Point,” “The Pumpkin Eater,” “7 Women,” Broadway and film versions of “The Miracle Worker” (her 1962 best actress Oscar-winner), and everybody’s favorite seductive suburbanite, Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate.”

“When I started out, I did anything. I was a child,” says the actress, whose actual billing should read Anna Maria Louisa Italiano Kaminsky. “As I grew up, I began to understand all these complexities. I knew it was grist for the mill.”

That mill began grinding in the early 1950s. Just as the curtain was ringing down on Hollywood’s golden age, 20th Century Fox signed a young woman who had just begun to make a splash on television in New York.

“I think I signed that Fox contract when I was--what? 19?” Bancroft recalls gleefully. “So I was under contract to Fox for three years. You were not allowed to do television. You were not allowed to work anywhere but there. And they managed to find one or two movies every year for me to do. I thought it was so wonderful. A little girl from the Bronx and I was in moving pictures, meeting these people like Victor Mature--that handsome, gorgeous man. And Richard Widmark.”

Well, “Gorilla at Large” wasn’t exactly what she had in mind when she began in this business, but Hollywood was a lot easier on the constitution than live TV.

“I did all of the popular shows: ‘Studio One,’ ‘Philco Playhouse,’ ‘Kraft,’ ‘Suspense,’ ‘Danger.’ I did that for about a year and a half before I got the contract with Fox,” she says. “From an actor’s standpoint, it’s the worst of both mediums--the stage and the screen--because you’ve got to do it from beginning to end like you do on a stage, then you’ve got to hit your mark.”

But then there was the really rough personal stuff for her to deal with. For at the end of her Fox contract she was back in New York and--for a while--at loose ends.

“I had been married and divorced. I was very, very unhappy, and I went back just to live in my mother’s house again. I was very young when I first went to Hollywood, and I really needed help. I went into psychoanalysis, got reacquainted with my family, and then ‘Two for the Seesaw’ happened. . . . Then my life really started to turn around, because after that came ‘The Miracle Worker.’ [Playwright] Bill Gibson offered me that; I think it was in Philadelphia, when we were on the road with ‘Two for the Seesaw.’ . . . I hadn’t even read it and I said ‘yes.’ ”

The role of Annie Sullivan, the woman who taught a blind, deaf and mute youngster named Helen Keller how to live, put Bancroft on a new show business plateau. But rather than stay there in similarly uplifting roles, Bancroft shifted ground once again in “The Graduate”--a film she recalls with unbridled enthusiasm.

“Mrs. Robinson was using sex as a way to diffuse this rage inside of herself. The rage was about her dreams not coming true, her youth being gone,” says Bancroft. “She’s out to assuage all these terrible feelings she has. And the only thing she has been able to find, since art was taken away from her--you see, she studied art in college--is sex. It’s easy. So having this naive little kid, Benjamin, that Dustin Hoffman played, teaching him everything she liked and wanted--what could be better? She uses sex to forget. She just punished everybody and everything, and used the sex.”

Many have remarked how Bancroft’s scenes with Hoffman echoed routines that director Mike Nichols used to do with his comedy partner Elaine May. And Bancroft says that comparison is right on the money.

“Mike used to direct us that way. I’d say, ‘Well I don’t understand what you want for this scene,’ and he’d say, ‘Well look, I’ll do it for you as Elaine and I would do it.’ ‘Cause he’d say to me sometimes, ‘I’d like it sexier.’ And then he’d do it they way he and Elaine would do it, and I’d say, ‘Oh, I get it--you want it angry.’ ”

The year before, Bancroft was working for an entirely different sort of director, John Ford, in “7 Women.” His very last film, this all-stops-out melodrama about a group of missionaries in war-torn China of the 1930s has become a cult classic.

“Do you know how ‘7 Women’ happened? Patricia Neal was playing the part, and she had a major stroke. Pat was a friend of mine, ‘cause we had worked in ‘The Miracle Worker’ [on Broadway]. . . .

“They shot about three weeks with Pat, so we had to go back and re-shoot it all. . . . John Ford--what an experience,” she says. “There was a band on the set, and every morning when he arrived, the band would play. So we’d say, ‘Yep. He’s here.’ We’d sit around and read the script, the scene we were going to do that day--and if he didn’t like it, he’d just rip the pages right out of the script.

“So I’m working with some of the most wonderful actresses--Margaret Leighton, Dame Flora Robson, Betty Field.”

But Ford treated Bancroft specially--for the part, while that of a woman, was clearly modeled after John Wayne.

“He used to call me ‘Duke,’ ” says Bancroft. “And I tried to be John Wayne too.” I can’t remember psychologically what was happening when I was doing it, but what that character was fighting about with those women at that mission was that there was too much yin in their situation and not enough yang.”

Anne and Mel, Quite a Pair

For her part, Bancroft found plenty of yin and yang when she met Mel Brooks, the legendary comic madman she’s been married to since the mid-1960s. “I met Mel the last week of ‘The Miracle Worker.’ I started to do ‘The Perry Como Show,’ where I was singing and dancing with Perry Como. At the Actors Studio around that time I had been working on ‘My Fair Lady.’ We had a piano player there, Charles Strouse. ‘Buddy,’ we called him. So he played for us and I sang, ‘Just You Wait, Henry Higgins, Just You Wait.’ So I was doing the Perry Como and Buddy was passing by with his writer and his lyricist of a musical they were doing called ‘All-American.’ And Buddy said, ‘Anne Bancroft’s doing the show this week, why don’t we have a visit cause I know her.’

“And I was up on stage dancing away and at the end of the dance I heard someone say, ‘Hey, Anne Bancroft! I’m Mel Brooks!’ And I turned around and I saw him, and I said to myself, ‘That guy looks like my father, and acts like my mother. He’s for me!’ And then he followed me everywhere I went. When I left the theater, he was outside. I was trying to get a cab. And he whistled one of those New York whistles and got one. Well, I was fascinated with that. . . .

“I had no idea he was calling my friends, and finding out where I was going to be. Isn’t that a wonderful thing to do? It’s so imaginative, and creative and energetic. You know, it’s like the end of a yoga session, where you say, ‘The spirit in me greets the spirit in you.’ It’s the spirits that are meeting. And I think that’s what happened with Mel and I.”

Right now, Bancroft’s directing her spirit toward adapting Anne Roiphe’s novel “Lovingkindness” to the screen. She’s written the script, and “we’ve gotten the money, and now we’re looking for a director.” But she’s not going to direct herself, though she did so in 1980 with a bittersweet comedy called “Fatso,” starring Dom DeLuise.

“Never again,” says Bancroft. “Not my cup of tea. It’s probably not stressful for somebody made to do it, but I’m not made to do it. I’m not that kind of person. I’d much rather be the child than the grown-up.”

Then the child lets loose with a very grown-up laugh.

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Review of the Movie: * Kenneth Turan reviews the film of Somerset Maugham’s novella. F16