NEW YORK, June 8 (UPI) -- Oscar-winning actress Anne Bancroft, best remembered for her role in "The Graduate," has died in New York of cancer at age 73, a family spokesman said.
Her husband, film producer Mel Brooks, told People magazine she had been ill for some time. She died Monday night of uterine cancer at Mt. Sinai Hospital.
Bancroft won a Best Actress Oscar for her role as the teacher of a blind Helen Keller in the 1962 movie "The Miracle Worker," although she reluctantly acknowledged to interviewers that most people remembered her as the seductress Mrs. Robinson in the 1967 film "The Graduate," with Dustin Hoffman.
She was nominated for an Oscar for that role, as well as for her work in "The Pumpkin Eater" in 1964, "The Turning Point" in 1977, and "Agnes of God" in 1985.
Bancroft and Brooks married in 1964 and have a son, Max Brooks, born in 1972.
Brooks was at her side when she died Monday. Once asked to explain the success of their marriage, Brooks said he always made his wife laugh, and he was always scared of her.
