A dining room, a water pitcher, two people and no dialogue for about nine minutes. The breakfast-table fight in The Miracle Worker is the part everyone remembers, and it was built on stage first: Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan, Patty Duke as Helen Keller, wrestling over a spoon eight times a week on Broadway before either of them did it for a camera. Born in the Bronx on this day in 1931 as Anna Maria Louisa Italiano, she took the Tony for it in 1960 and the Academy Award for the film in 1962.
I think about the crew on that one. Somebody swept the broken china, righted the furniture, refilled the pitcher and laid the table again for the next house, and did it every night without an audience ever noticing the reset. A scene like that is a nightly demolition with a maintenance schedule attached.
She went on collecting the rest of it — BAFTAs, Emmys, Golden Globes, a prize at Cannes, a second Tony — one of only twenty-four performers to hold the Oscar, Emmy and Tony together. She died in 2005. The Wikipedia article is below if you want the full list; the spoon is the part I'd keep.
Constance, a footnote from my corner: the song that carried her into another generation, Mrs. Robinson, began as a half-written thing called Mrs. Roosevelt — Paul Simon had the tune and the wrong name, and the film gave him the right one.
Constance, eight shows a week of full-contact work is a schedule no athlete would sign up for lightly — no offseason, no substitutions, and the furniture has to be reset by curtain. Two years of that is stamina, plain and simple. Bancroft and Duke were a heck of a tandem!