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No Money for Dates. Bronx neighbors still remember the thin, dark-haired girl on the way home from school, munching a 5¢ pickle and reading plays as she walked. But in her senior year Anne inexplicably decided to become a lab technician and work nobly at the side of some great researcher. Mamma again called the shots, scraped up the $500 tuition to send Anne to the august American Academy of Dramatic Arts. It was just two weeks before graduation from the Academy that she was discovered practicing alone on the school's darkened stage while everyone else was out to lunch. That chance encounter eventually got her a part in a TV production of Turgenev's Torrents of Spring. "Look," says Annie as she tries to find some modest explanation for the fact that she worked even during her lunch hours. "I had no money for malteds and no dates. What the hell was there for me to do but stay onstage when the other kids were out?"
Anne Marno: CDXX. After the family celebration, after the gilded sign ("Welcome home, star!") came down from the Italiano door, other acting jobs came slowly. Anne kept busy peddling chocolate-covered cherries in drugstores and giving English lessons to Peruvian Singer Yma Sumac. Then she got a running part in the TV version of The Goldbergs. Danger, Suspense, and other CBS shows began to use "Anne Marno," as she then called herself. Her acting reputation grew. In his files, TV Director Franklin Schaffner still keeps a card for Anne Marno with the coded notation: CDXX. Translation: can play comedy, or drama, is excellent actress.
In 1951, 20th Century-Fox screen-tested an aspiring actor named Doug Rogers, and Anne agreed to help him out by playing opposite. Result: no one noticed Rogers (says Anne: "I don't know where the kid is now"), but Fox signed Anne. Of course Mamma went along to Hollywood—on Anne's first plane ride. She had to see her daughter settled in a small Sunset Boulevard apartment before she felt it safe to return to Macy's.
On her own at last, Anna Maria Louise Italiano chose the Hollywood name, Anne Bancroft, from a list handed out by Darryl Zanuck; it was the only name, she thought, that "did not sound like I should look like Lana Turner." Hollywood historians remember her first movie, Don't Bother to Knock, chiefly because it was the first big role for a future star named Marilyn Monroe. Anne Bancroft was just an added starter.
She played Impresario Sol Hurok's wife in a George Jessel-produced turkey called Tonight We Sing. She played a Roman lady in Demetrius and the Gladiators, a Civil War widow, a carnival aerialist, a gangster's daughter and an interminable list of Indian girls. For one movie (The Last Frontier), with Robert (Music Man) Preston, Anne even became a blonde.