“She’s the Beast in the Jungle”: Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate

Anne Bancroft in “The Graduate”, 1967. Lawrence Truman Productions

There are quite a few iconic images from the set of The Graduate: Katherine Ross and Dustin Hoffman running from the church, Dustin Hoffman hiding in his room, and that striking shot of Anne Bancroft in close up and Hoffman in the back. They were shot by Bob Willoughby, the Hollywood photographer who was as great as the stars he shot. Bob Willoughby is considered Hollywood’s first behind the scenes photographer, the first “unit photographer”. His job was to capture the moments of a performance live, during a take as it was unfolding, and also between takes, watching everything as the world was being made. “He wasn’t a unit photographer actually,” his son, Christopher Willoughby, told me in our interview. “A unit photographer is a union photographer traditionally hired by the studio and is part of the film crew – and when they’re done, they hand over all the work to the studio. Bob was referred to as a special and retained ownership of his work. The images were licensed to magazines and other clients, including the studios, for publication.”

Bob Willoughby’s job was to create a story for his clients, the filmmakers, within their own world. “He always read the script and the shooting schedule and would research the film,” Christopher Willoughby remembers. “Was it to be on location, were there historical aspects to the script he could incorporate? When dad started on the film (ed. note: The Graduate), he was introduced to the cast, including Dustin Hoffman, a young New York actor doing his first film, but he looked familiar. As they were shaking hands, dad asked if his mother’s name was Lillian and his father’s was Harry – and Hoffman said “Yes”. “Dusty! I used to babysit you and your brother Ronald a hundred years ago on Orange Drive”.

Dustin Hoffman, a Broadway actor at his first film role, was not what Mike Nichols and Buck Henry, the co-screenwriter, first had in mind for Benjamin Braddock. “Sand in the genes, the roar of the ocean. Robert Redford and Candice Bergen, the ideal couple – that’s what we were thinking,” Henry recalls, as cited in the book Mike Nichols: A Life, by Mark Harris. Eventually they chose Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross. After his screen test, which Hoffman barely got through because of his nervousness, nobody thought he was going to get the part. But when Nichols saw the screen test on film, he knew he had found Benjamin. “He had this thing I’d only seen in Elizabeth Taylor, and that I’d certainly not seen in any of the other tests. That secret. That deal with Technicolor where you do nothing and it turns out you were doing everything. He was compelling and hilarious and impassive, it was startling. That’s what a great movie actor does. They don’t know how they do it, and I don’t know how they do it, but the difference is shocking.”

There was something more in Hoffman however, and more in Hoffman as Benjamin, that Nichols saw in his lead man. A resemblance to himself, “a visitor in a strange land,” writes Mark Harris, “the story of an alienated young man cosseted by privilege, smothered by the comforts that surround him, and determined to listen to himself.”

Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman on the set of in “The Graduate”, 1967, photographed by Bob Willoughby

The Graduate was something new altogether, modern-looking and an important exploration of the generation gap that dug into youth counter-culture and sensibilities more straightforward than any other film of the 1960s. The soundtrack was part of that look. The Graduate was one of the first films to be defined also by its music and one of the earliest needle drops (the use of pre-existing music in film). Nichols chose the music for the film himself after, during in preproduction, he listened over and over again to the album Sounds of Silence, by Simon & Garfunkel, which his brother had sent him. And it wasn’t until he played his team the music, William Daniels (who played Mr. Braddock) remembers, that they realised “this was all going to be told through Dustin’s eyes,” and that it might be “a significant film”.

Nichols liked and had this ability to see and tell a story from a different angle, breaking away from the conventions of both theater and old Hollywood. He had done that in his plays as well (his first theater play, Barefoot in the Park, starring Robert Redford, was considered revolutionary), after he had honed his style and verbal with with Elaine May in their innovative comedy act, and now he was doing it in his movies (The Graduate was only his second film, after his much acclaimed debut feature, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). “My father was a big fan of Mike Nichols and was impressed by his intellectual flexibility,” Christopher Willoughby says, “his ability to change direction on set; getting the cast to play a serious scene for laughs for instance.” Nichols would say that “it’s only when rehearsals start, and the characters begin to be people, that I see what’s happening and what has to be made stronger,” writes in the book Mike Nichols: A Life. “That’s when I begin to have my ideas.” His visual idea on film for was something entirely new in the film world in the 1960s, at a pivotal moment for the future of the American cinema, heralding the birth of the New Hollywood.

Audiences identified with Benjamin, just as they identified with Simon and Garfunkel’s music that they were already familiar with. A recent graduate from an East Coast school, Benjamin returns to his parents’ California suburban house and finds himself stuck in their empty-headed materialism, his confusion bordering on despair, smothered by things in excess and tangled up in a relationship with his parents’ friend’s middle-age wife Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). His disorientation is revealed in his clothes as well. An East Coast Ivy look – brown corduroy or navy jacket, button-down shirts, striped ties and chinos – that says so clearly that he is still not past his college years. “Here’s Benjamin. He is a little worried about his future,” read the tagline on the film’s official poster. College had given him an identity. Now he is lost, unsure of what to to with his life, but certain that he doesn’t belong in his parents’ world of plastic. The anxiety, fear and loathing he projects in the face of all that are so understated yet unfadable that it’s haunting.

Anne Bancroft’s leg in a nylon stocking is the star of one of the most recognizable movie posters in the history of cinema.

“Mrs. Robinson, you are trying to seduce me… Aren’t you?”

Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate”, 1967. Lawrence Truman Productions

Anne Bancroft was thirty-six at the time, a decade too young for Mrs. Robinson. Make-up, lightning and a grey streak in her hair were used to make her look older than she was. Mike Nichols and Dick Sylbert, the production designer, were looking “to create the leathery tan of a middle-aged woman whose empty days left her with too much time to lounge by the pool,” writes Mark Harris. Film costumes have hardly ever been more character-defining than the clothes of glamorous, elegant cougar Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. It was Mike Nichols who insisted on her being wrapped up stylishly in nothing but animal print throughout the film, and he and Sylbert came up “with a palette – shiny blacks, animal prints, and wildly overgrown garden foliage for Mrs. Robinson’s lair (they called her ‘the beast in the jungle’)”. Her intentions are clearly outlined by her clothes, designed by Patricia Zipprodt. The sixties were the time when animal print was still considered the height of elegance when done right. And there is no one who has worn it more fiercely yet ladylike than Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson.

But it was Mike Nichols who helped Anne Bancroft get into that state of anger, cold bitterness and predatory power that defines her character. “She’s much too nice,” Nichols told Bancroft when he admitted to her that he didn’t like her approach to the character. Then he gave a line reading, “something he almost never did, in a chilly, detached, almost entirely uninflected tone,” Mark Harris relates in his book, and it was enough for Anne Bancroft to find her character: “I can do that. That’s anger.”

”The beast in the jungle”, as Mike Nichols and Buck Henry described Mrs. Robinson.
“The Graduate”, 1967. Lawrence Truman Productions

Ava Gardner was initially considered for the film, but it is now impossible to imagine anyone else in the role of Mrs. Robinson than the ironically cool Bancroft. In a 2000 interview with Charlie Rose, she said: “There was nobody else who could play the part like I did.” She found her fame after she played to perfection Mrs. Robinson, a married woman who uses her worldly sexuality to seduce a young college graduate. Her multi-layered performance reveals not only a tawdry seductress with a scheming exterior when dressed in animal print, but a vulnerable middle aged housewife when she is stripped of her clothes. Arthur Penn, who directed Bancroft in the two plays she won Tony Awards for and in the film The Miracle Worker (1962), which won her an Oscar, told The New York Times: “More happens in her face in 10 seconds than happens in most women’s faces in 10 years.” She says more by saying nothing at all, she says more with her eyes and face than most actors do in lengthy monologues. It’s all in the attitude. And doesn’t any symbol of glamour, like animal print here, first and foremost require the right attitude to wear it large and wear it right?