Anna Maria Louisa Italiano was born in 1931 in the Bronx, New York. She was the middle of three daughters of parents Mildred DiNapoli, a telephone operator, and Michael G. Italiano a dress pattern maker.
Her parents were both children of Italian immigrants. In an interview, she stated that her family was originally from Muro Lucano, in the province of Potenza. After appearing in a number of live television dramas under the name Anne Marno, she was told to change her surname, as it was “too ethnic for movies”; she chose Bancroft “because it sounded dignified.”
In 1957, Bancroft was directed by Jacques Tourneur in a David Goodis adaptation, Nightfall. In 1958, she made her Broadway debut as lovelorn, Bronx-accented Gittel Mosca opposite Henry Fonda in William Gibson’s two-character play Two for the Seesaw. For this role, she won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play.
Bancroft won the Tony Award again in 1960, when she played Annie Sullivan, the young woman who teaches the child Helen Keller to communicate in The Miracle Worker. She appeared in the 1962 film version of the play and won the 1962 Academy Award for Best Actress, with Patty Duke repeating her own success as Keller alongside Bancroft.
Bancroft was widely known for her role as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967), for which she received a third Academy Award nomination. In the film, she played an unhappily married woman who seduces the son of her husband’s business partner, the much younger recent college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman.
Bancroft is one of ten actors to have won both an Academy Award and a Tony Award for the same role (as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker), and one of very few entertainers to win an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony award. This rare achievement is also known as the Triple Crown of Acting. She followed that success with a second television special, Annie and the Hoods (1974), which was telecast on ABC and featured her husband Mel Brooks as a guest star. She received a fourth Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in 1977 for her performance in The Turning Point (1977) opposite Shirley MacLaine, and a fifth nomination for Best Actress in 1985 for her performance in Agnes of God (1985) opposite Jane Fonda.
Bancroft made her debut as a screenwriter and director in Fatso (1980), in which she starred with fellow Italian American Dom DeLuise.
In the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, Bancroft took supporting roles in a number of films in which she co-starred with major film stars—including Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) with Nicolas Cage, Love Potion No. 9 (1992) with Sandra Bullock, Malice (1993) with Nicole Kidman, Point of No Return (1993) with Bridget Fonda, Home for the Holidays (1995) and Heartbreakers (2001) with Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sigourney Weaver and Gene Hackman. She also lent her voice to the animated film Antz (1998).
Bancroft’s final appearance was as herself in a 2004 episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Her last project was the animated feature film Delgo, released posthumously in 2008. The film was dedicated to her. Bancroft received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her work in television.
Anne Bancroft died of uterine cancer at age 73 on June 6, 2005 in Manhattan.
Source: Wiki