Anne Bancroft

I've seen a couple of her movies -- The Graduate and The Miracle Worker -- in which she played starring roles. The Graduate is a substantially influential movie, more than probably most people realize.

In The Graduate, she plays Mrs. Robinson, a middle-aged woman who seduces the main character, Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate who has returned home after college nominally to job hunt but spends the summer mostly in bed with this older woman.

The opening lines of the George Michael song Too Funky reference this movie. In specific, they reference the iconic scene where Mrs. Robinson initiates a sexual relationship with a much younger man, the son of some neighbors or something.

I am not trying to seduce you

Would you like me to seduce you?

Is that what you're trying to tell me?

The song Mrs. Robinson is about this character and appears in part in the movie. 

Anne Bancroft was married to Mel Brooks and I saw an interview with her once and I believe in that interview she said he didn't feel capable of something career-wise so "I sent him to therapy." My impression was she was an unusually empowered and self possessed woman with an unusually egalitarian marriage.

She also talked about the character Mrs. Robinson and said something like she viewed the character as having wanted more out of life.

In other words, Mrs. Robinson was a married-well homemaker and her life was empty. Unlike Anne Bancroft, Mrs. Robinson didn't have a career of her own, so she was bored and unfulfilled, thus the outrageous affair with a scandalously younger man who at some point finds himself in the extremely awkward position of being introduced to his married lover's daughter and set up on a date with the girl.

So, of course, Benjamin Braddock tries to be as unlikable as possible and tries to get her to reject him, then he ends up regretting it because she's hurt and he finds himself really liking her. But he doesn't really have a means to smooth things over and explain his good intentions.

If nothing else, I love the movie for showing so clearly that sometimes there are no good answers to a social conundrum no matter how well meaning you are.

The movie is unusual in that it just kind of describes this hot mess of a situation as social critique without really blaming or accusing any of the people in it. Mrs. Robinson isn't potrayed as a terrible person. Benjamin Braddock isn't portrayed as a terrible person. The people trying to get Benjamin Braddock a date aren't terrible people intentionally fixing him up with his lover's daughter.

And then it has this weird ending where the daughter walks out on her wedding and ends up on a bus in her wedding dress sitting next to Benjamin Braddock and neither of them seems to have any idea what they are doing.

It doesn't vilify anyone and it doesn't really propose solutions. It just kind of tells you suburban homemaker lifestyles are deeply broken. It's a problem to have an intelligent, hard working woman in her forties with money in hand and nothing to really occupy herself and no real purpose because her child is an adult and getting married and having achieved all that she is supposed to achieve as a full-time homemaker, she's got no place to go with it now that her child is grown.

So she's spending that money on hotel rooms to meet her scandalously younger lover to fill her days.

A clip from the movie was also at some point used in a plastics industry commercial. A lot of people probably didn't realize that in the original movie "Plastics" as a career suggestion for Benjamin Braddock at some party was kind of ridiculous. It became a successful industry but that wasn't really an expectation when it was included as a humorous scene in the movie.

Mrs. Robinson is unapologetically an older woman with sexual and emotional needs and there's no suggestion that she's beautiful and he can't resist or similar Cinderella fairytale story themes of women must be beautiful and virtuous and then some man will take magically take care of her.

She pursues him. He doesn't really try that hard to turn her down and having agreed once, just keeps seeing her because he's a young guy getting all the sex he can handle and that's his metric apparently and he doesn't really care beyond that.

Dustin Hoffman is not your stereotypical classically handsome leading man either. It's a story about two people who aren't members of The Beautiful People (TM) having sex for the sake of sex. And it gripped the subconscious of the nation in ways people didn't really want to analyze too deeply.

In a world that largely focuses on career success and earned income as metrics of equality, it's a movie about an older woman getting her sexual needs met without first having a career and money of her own to justify it.

And it inspired various references for decades afterwards while people continue to not really say too much about what is shocking about that movie.

Anne Bancroft is also the visually impaired, tough as nails teacher in the older black-and-white version of The Miracle Worker who teaches Helen Keller sign language. I've probably seen the movie in full once and watched YouTube clips a zillion times because I'm seriously handicapped and I absolutely love Helen Keller quotes and what little I know of her life.

Wikipedia also indicates she had a role in G.I. Jane, which I've never seen. That makes me want to see it at some point.

If you are younger than me, you may not be particularly familiar with her firsthand but you are probably still hearing and seeing things that reference her work directly or indirectly. If you are consuming media that references other media that references her work, you are still being influenced by her today.