American actress Anne Bancroft dies

NEW YORK - Actress Anne Bancroft, the husky-voiced beauty who rose from an Italian neighbourhood in New York to become a Hollywood star immortalised as the seductive Mrs Robinson in 1967's The Graduate has died.

Bancroft, 73, died in New York of uterine cancer, John Barlow, a spokesman for Bancroft's husband, comedian and director Mel Brooks, said.

Barlow said the Oscar-winning American actress died on Monday evening (US time) at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

Broadway theatres were planning to dim their marquees in her honour before Wednesday's shows.

Born Anna Maria Italiano in 1931 in New York's Bronx borough, she got her start in movies in the 1950s.

She won an Oscar for her 1962 film The Miracle Worker, where she played Annie Sullivan, the extraordinary teacher to blind, deaf and speechless Helen Keller in the movie directed by Arthur Penn.

Over her long career, she garnered a further four Academy Award nominations for The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Graduate (1967), The Turning Point (1977), and Agnes of God (1985).

She also won two Tony Awards for her work on the Broadway stage, including one for the stage version of The Miracle Worker in 1960.

In 1964, she married comedian and director Brooks, whom she met when the struggling comedy writer attended a taping of a Perry Como TV special in which she was singing and dancing.

Bancroft began her acting studies at New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts as a 17-year-old and found work in the early days of live television.

After being lured to Hollywood by producer Darryl Zanuck and working in more than a dozen largely forgettable features, she returned to New York and became a member of the famed Actors Studio and embraced the "method" acting popularised by such stars of the day as Marlon Brando.

Directed by Penn, she won a Tony in 1958 starring opposite Henry Fonda in Two for the Seasaw, and followed that with her star turn in The Miracle Worker.

She teamed up with Brooks to star in a 1984 remake of the 1942 comedy classic To Be or Not to Be, by Ernst Lubitsch.

The sultry, dark-haired beauty evinced intelligence, yet might be best remembered for the flash of stockinged leg and cold, calculated seduction of her daughter's boyfriend in The Graduate. The movie spawned the classic Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack hit Mrs Robinson.

Director Penn once said of her, "She's made of heavy-duty Bronx material ... a kid off the streets."

Bancroft is survived by Brooks, her son Max Brooks and grandson Henry Michael Brooks.

- REUTERS