Anne Bancroft

Anne Bancroft, the versatile, husky-voiced actress who won an Academy Award for portraying Helen Keller's teacher in "The Miracle Worker" but will forever be remembered as the coldly seductive Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate," has died. She was 73. Bancroft died Monday night of uterine cancer at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, John Barlow, spokesman for Bancroft's husband, entertainer Mel Brooks, announced Tuesday.

Anne Bancroft was only six years older than Dustin Hoffman when she played a woman twice his age. Then, as now, a woman's age was a complicated thing in the movies, requiring highly theoretical recalibrations. Sometimes, like in "The Graduate," it was the whole story. Bancroft was 36 when the movie was made, an age that either gets nudged past 40 when it appears on-screen or, if a star's status allows it, arrested in a vague, childish, eternal 26.