The beach is a studio backdrop. Those Hollywood tricksters! Normally when I see old photographs of movie stars I just think 'oh, look at the movie star when they were younger!' But in this case I had a total psychic disconnect...
I was like "Anne Bancroft was alive in the 50s!???" as if this had never occurred to me before. The most vivid Anne Bancroft memories all come from 1960s movies (The Graduate, The Pumpkin Eater, The Miracle Worker) and, for me at least, watching of those same movies in the 1980s when I was a kid and knew her primarily from her work and marriage to Mel Brooks and movies like Torch Song Trilogy (where she played Harvey Fierstein's homophobic mother) and that overheated psycho nuns drama Agnes of God. I guess I always thought of her as an older woman, one of these stars that came to prominence only late in life. I was wrong. She was only 35 when she was creating the ultimate older woman role in "Mrs. Robinson" and just 6 years older than Dustin Hoffman.From 1953 to 1956, 'round the chronology of that beach photo, she made 11 movies. She was the same age as Scarlett Johansson now. I'm flipping out.
Time Capsule: In 1955 Disneyland (previous post) was opening in Anaheim, Gunsmoke (the longest running TV series of all time) was debuting on CBS, James Dean, the same age as Bancroft, was crashing his porsche tragically dying just months after the first of his three classics (East of Eden) opened in theaters, and "Rock Around the Clock" was making waves on the radio as one of the first hits of the modern rock era.
