As Turner Classic Movies “A Summer Under the Stars” (each day is devoted to the films of a different Hollywood star) keeps chugging along, we get to spend today with Anne Bancroft. Bancroft is best known as the scandalous Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate and Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher, in The Miracle Worker but she played a variety of ladies in her time on the screen.

One of those roles was as a woman going through a nervous breakdown and multiple husbands in Harold Pinter’s The Pumpkin Eater.

It’s a particularly powerful performance as Dan Callahan at The House Next Door points out:

Bancroft’s performance here is nearly impenetrable, too; she’s so immersed in creating the extreme of this woman’s lower-than-low mood that sometimes her face is nothing but a tragic mask with the merest glimmers of legible emotion behind her liquid, widely spaced dark eyes. In flashbacks to happier times, Bancroft’s eyes squeeze shut whenever she’s taken with one of her overcome, juicy smiles, but this same smile turns into a choked grimace when she breaks down in Harrods department store:

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The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Check out our most popular articles of the week on a variety of subjects, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites.

Katie:

Helen Keller & Anne Sullivan Surfaces 120 Years Later

Hallelujah For American Idol, Jeff Buckley and Leonard Cohen

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Nicole:

Google Gives Free Voicemail to San Francisco Homeless

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Turnes 80

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Giulia:

Patrick Swayze’s Cancer Battle

Koby Bryant’s PSA for ASR

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Gina:

Reese’s Empowering Bracelet

“Chop Shop” - Dreams In a Place of Despair

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Kerry:

Bamboo Laptop: Will Apple Be Green with Envy?

The Explosive Truth About Twinkies

Helen Keller was 8 years old, holding the hand of her teacher Anne Sullivan, and cradling a doll in the 1888 photograph was discovered 120 years after it was taken in Cape Cod. The photograph is especially significant because it may be the first photograph taken of Keller and Sullivan, and is the only photograph of Keller with a doll, which is the first word Sullivan taught Keller to sign. In June, Thaxter Spencer, an 87-year-old man whose mother spent her summers in Cape Cod and knew Keller, donated photo albums, letters, diaries and other heirlooms to the New England Historic Genealogical Society. The staff recently realized the significance of the photo.

Helen Keller had been left blind and deaf after an illness, most likely Scarlet Fever, when she was 19 months. On, what Keller describes as “the most important day I can remember in my life,” Sullivan came to the Kellers’ home, where she was hired to teach Helen. Sullivan was 20 years old and had graduated from the Perkins School for the Blind. Sullivan, who had been blind but regained her site after several operations, taught Helen language by spelling words manually into her hand.

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