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Annie is one of the countless hopefuls whom Hollywood could not appreciate, who came home after a broken marriage and 18 second-rate movies. But the corn grows even taller. Annie is also the girl who finally got a crack at Broadway and became the hottest ticket in town on her first try. And finally—most typical cliche of the times—she is the girl who is now trying to find herself in long, earnest hours of psychoanalysis.
Poet & Piano Mover. Her luminous eyes—so bright that Hollywood cameramen never liked to shoot her too close—and her fine, mobile mouth are often overshadowed by a carefully careless costume: thick, shapeless sweaters, flat shoes, coarse hair uncombed, and the rugged tongue of someone who takes refuge in being thought a "kook." She loves to demonstrate eccentricity. One night she was sitting with a group of friends who were kidding her about her carelessness with money. Promptly Annie pulled a $20 bill from her purse and started eating it, nibbling the edges like a rabbit tackling lettuce. "I just love to eat money," said she, savoring the effect. "I must take it up with my analyst some time."
But behind the footlights, Anne Bancroft is always the serious, controlled artist, whose features can change from tenderness to humor to ferocity to sultriness with astonishing ease and conviction. Says her sometime acting coach, Herbert Berghof: "She is like a little daughter of Anna Magnani." In Miracle Worker, she is completely in charge of an extraordinarily demanding role, a role that requires of the actress what it required of Annie Sullivan in real life: the sensitivity of a poet and the strength of a piano mover. It is a role that is doubly difficult because it demands a violation of one of the prime commandments of theatrical experience: never get on stage for too long with a child. But just as the triumph of Annie Sullivan's fierce and unsentimental love was burnished by her battle against the afflictions of Helen Keller, so the triumph of Anne Bancroft's stagecraft burgeons beside the improbable polish of her 13-year-old colleague, Patty Duke.
The miracle of The Miracle Worker is that night after night, the militant kook from The Bronx and the tireless kid from Manhattan tenements re-create with consuming vitality the remarkable collaboration between blind child and half-blind adult that blossomed in Tuscumbia, Ala. three-quarters of a century ago. So successful are the two actresses that Author Gibson is convinced they transcend the bounds of mere acting. "I've always felt the curtain call was haunted," says Gibson. "A high percentage of the applause is for the people who really lived."