I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that Anne Bancroft, who died Monday at age 73, was only 35 when she played the part of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate when it was being made in early ’67. Only six years older than costar Dustin Hoffman, who was playing a kid of about 20 or 21, and barely embarked upon adulthood by today’s standards, and yet Bancroft was very convincingly playing a World War II generation woman of 45 or so. That sexy-husky voice of hers and those streaks of gray helped, along with the cultivated airs and way of speaking that any Bel Air woman would naturally try to project. But when “Mrs. Robinson” gets aggravated (like when she says “What?” to Hoffman when he asks her what kind of car did she and husband-to-be Murray Hamilton make love in during college), her Bronx accent is as plain as day. I love the way Bancroft says, “It was a Fawwhd, Benjamin. A Fawwhd.” That lying-in-bed hotel room scene in which Hoffman insists on having a meaningful conversation with her is a classic. Mrs. Robinson resists the idea initially, at first by facetiously saying “why don’t we talk about art?” She later reveals she was an art student when she got pregnant and got married to Hamilton, and thereafter gave it up. The look on Bancroft’s face is devastating when Hoffman says to her with a tone of genuine sympathy, “I guess you kind of forgot about [art] over the years.” And she says very gently (or do I mean weakly?), “Kind of.”