After a youthful flirtation with television, a near-disastrous relationship with Hollywood and a failed marriage, the actor Anne Bancroft, who has died of cancer aged 73, fled the west coast and returned home to New York. It was the late 1950s and "life was a shambles", she recalled. "I was terribly immature. I was going steadily downhill in terms of self-respect and dignity."
She needed to reclaim her life and career and she did so, initially on Broadway. Opposite Henry Fonda, she won a Tony award as best supporting actress for her role as Gittel Mosca, a nonconformist young woman from the Bronx, in Two For The Seesaw, which opened in 1958.
There was a second Tony, the following year, for best actress, as Annie Sullivan, the teacher of the deaf and dumb Helen Keller (Patty Duke) in The Miracle Worker. When the latter was transferred to the screen by its author William Gibson and director Arthur Penn, she again played Sullivan, winning the best actress Oscar in 1963.
This success relaunched her career, leading to prestige roles in the theatre including Mother Courage, Sister Jeanne in The Devils and Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes. There were film roles, too, most famously as the seductive Mrs Robinson in the modish The Graduate (1967).
This movie, in which Dustin Hoffman made one of his earliest screen appearances, became so closely associated with Bancroft as a 1960s archetype that it obscured her subsequent career.
She was also famously married to the Jewish actor-director Mel Brooks, whose mother, told that he was going to marry an Italian-American Catholic, replied: "Bring the girl over. I'll be in the kitchen, with my head in the oven". Despite comments such as these, the marriage was one of the most stable in show business.
It was also creative, and Brooks served as executive producer on films in which Bancroft excelled, including The Elephant Man (1980) and the two-hander 84 Charing Cross Road (1986).
These and other films made for his own company redeemed his often frantic comedies, three of which involved Bancroft.
In Silent Movie (1976) she - among other stars - glamorously played herself as a highlight of the film. Sadly, she was less well served when co-starring opposite Brooks in his lumpen remake of the Ernst Lubitsch classic To Be Or Not To Be (1983) and during her cameo appearance in his dire spoof Dracula: Dead And Loving It (1995).
Bancroft was born Anna Italiano in the Bronx to working-class immigrant Italian parents. Her father was a pattern-maker and her mother a telephone operator. It was the height of the depression, but even when her father became unemployed in the late 1930s, Anna was allowed tap dancing lessons: she had been singing and dancing from the age of two.
Leaving school, she thought about becoming a laboratory assistant, but under pressure from her mother she enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Her graduation piece was seen by the actress Frances Fuller, who recommended the 18-year-old for television work. Bancroft debuted under the name of Anne Marno in The Torrents Of Spring, and when The Goldbergs, a popular radio show, transferred to television she became a member of the TV family, working steadily for two years.
Having helped a fellow actor with a screen test, it was Bancroft who got the call from 20th Century Fox offering a $20,000- a-year contract. It was to prove a mixed blessing. Under her new name of Anne Bancroft, she made her movie debut in Don't Bother To Knock, made in 1952 but held up for a year.
Within five years she made 15 films, as various as the baseball movie The Kid From Left Field and Gorilla At Large (both 1953), Demetrius And The Gladiators (1954) and Walk The Proud Land (1956).
There were other routine westerns, modest thrillers including Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall (1957), plus the dismal The Girl In Black Stockings (1957).
By this time she was admitting to over-indulgence in alcohol. She had also made an unhappy marriage to Martin A May, a building contractor, and they divorced in 1957. She was also in psychoanalysis.
The road back involved work with a vocal coach, regular attendance at the Actors Studio, study with Herbert Berghof and three sessions a week with her therapist. Then came Two For The Seesaw and a triumphant return to acting.
When the film version of The Miracle Worker was announced, the backers wanted either Elizabeth Taylor or Audrey Hepburn, but Penn refused and budgeted it at only $500,000, shooting in New Jersey. At 31, Bancroft became an Oscar-winner and, in the words of one critic, "she left Hollywood a failure and returned a star".
Her subsequent career was far from conventional.
Her intelligence and fierce independence ensured that she never conformed to movie stardom. Working at her own pace and inclination, she turned down Funny Girl, which subsequently made Barbra Streisand famous. She played Mother Courage on stage and waited two years for a new film that was shot in Britain.
The Pumpkin Eater was about the disintegration of a marriage. The rather cold, overstylised direction by Jack Clayton could not obscure riveting performances by James Mason and Bancroft. Her harrowing portrayal as the distressed wife won her the 1964 best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, a Bafta and the second of her five Oscar nominations.
In 1966 she took the lead in John Ford's last movie, 7 Women. It was a curiosity that failed commercially. The same fate did not await The Graduate. The rapacious Mrs Robinson gained her another Oscar nomination and the third of her seven Bafta nominations as best actress.
It was also a commercial success and she and director Mike Nichols worked together again on The Little Foxes. Then Bancroft, who had married Brooks in 1964, took some time off, giving birth to their son Maximilian in 1968.
She returned to the screen in 1972, playing Jenny Churchill in Young Winston, prompting Richard Attenborough to describe her as "the greatest actress of her generation".
Two years later she starred in the Neil Simon comedy, The Prisoner Of Second Avenue, a welcome return to comedy, where she was perfectly cast opposite the frenetic Jack Lemmon.
Her seesaw career took a downturn with the dull The Hindenburg (1975), in which she played a countess, and hit rock bottom with the garish thriller Lipstick (1976). She was, more happily, herself in Silent Movie and Mary Magdalene in Franco Zeffirelli's mini-series Jesus Of Nazareth (1977).
Her luck improved when Audrey Hepburn declined to play the prima ballerina in The Turning Point (1977), giving Bancroft a substantial role as Shirley MacLaine's bitchy rival.
After another long career gap, she returned to the screen with Fatso (1980), which she also wrote and directed.
It was little shown and she was grateful for the tellingly elegant role of Mrs Kendal in The Elephant Man. This was her second film with Anthony Hopkins and they were reunited - albeit from opposite sides of the Atlantic - for the rather less distinguished 84 Charing Cross Road (1986).
Bancroft could always be relied on to add a touch of class to movies - especially if they had literary, religious or social themes.
Anne Bancroft (Anna Maria Louisa Italiano): born September 17th, 1931; died June 6th, 2005