Bancroft, Anne [née Anna Maria Luisa Italiano] (1931–2005), actress. Born in the Bronx, she studied at both the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Actors Studio before making her Broadway debut with a Tony Award–winning performance as Gittel Mosca, the Jewish girl who falls in love with a Midwestern lawyer, in Two for the Seesaw (1958). Of her performance Brooks Atkinson wrote, “She explodes with gestures that are natural, she modulates the part with vocal inflections that are both funny and authentic, and she creates a gallant character who rings true.” Bancroft's other outstanding Broadway role was Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller's devoted teacher, in The Miracle Worker (1959). Among her subsequent performances of note were wartime marketeer Mother Courage in Mother Courage and Her Children (1963), the sexually charged Prioress in The Devils (1965), scheming Regina in The Little Foxes (1967), Shakespeare's wife Anne in A Cry of Players (1968), the Israeli political figure Golda (1977), musician Stephanie Abrahams whose career is destroyed by a crippling disease in Duet for One (1981), and Louise Nevelson in the Off‐Broadway play Occupant (2002).

The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.