Appreciation: Anne Bancroft

She lay down on the bed, and her svelte leg made an inverted V, framing poor Benjamin Braddock. Against the bleak will of such a woman, the young man was no match--just a light lunch for the spider queen. That seduction scene from The Graduate showed the uses to which ANNE BANCROFT, 73, who died last week of uterine cancer, could apply her fierce intelligence and bold sexuality. As the predatory mother figure Mrs. Robinson, Bancroft (though she was only six years older than her co-star Dustin Hoffman) created a Francis Bacon portrait of brains gone to waste, and lust as idle combat.

Smart and stinging--that was Bancroft at her best. Born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano, she was groomed as a standard babe when Hollywood signed her at 20. It was like fitting a firestorm for a corset. She returned to New York City, and in 1958 became a Broadway star as the spirited Gittel in William Gibson's Two for the Seesaw. The next year she found her great role, as Annie Sullivan, the half-blind teacher of the blind and deaf Helen Keller, in Gibson's The Miracle Worker. Bancroft's ferocity, starkly colliding and beautifully meshing with Patty Duke's as Helen, made the play (and the 1962 film) a pure, intense parable of love. As Mrs. Robinson sucked life out of her prey, Annie forced life into Helen's isolated mind.

Bancroft got to exercise her hauteur in a few later films (The Turning Point, Agnes of God), but her longest and most piquant role was as wife, muse and keeper of Mel Brooks. They made an implausible, endearing couple: the crazy Brooklyn boy and the Bronx girl who, when they let her, could work miracles. --By Richard Corliss