Here's to You...

...Mrs. Brooks.  We're watching The Graduate right now...

Birthday Girl: Miracle Worker

Seen here looking uncharacteristically starlet-demure, Anne Bancroft more usually seemed quite comfortable being Larger than Life. She was that rare performer who could handle with equal ease the kind of anarchic comedy that she bought into as Mrs. Mel Brooks and took to quite different heights in The Graduate, high drama on the order of Agnes of God, and material like the childhood and raising of Helen Keller that in other, less capable hands could have dripped treacle and cheap inspiration.

I still think it's a shame she was cheated of her last act, as a grande dame of stage and screen on the order of Jessica Tandy, Sylvia Sidney, or Ruth Gordon; you can be sure she had some great old ladies in her, but now we'll never know.