She won another Oscar nomination for her role as a Mother Superior in Agnes of God (1985), and the Bafta Award as Best Actress for her warm portrayal of the American writer and book-lover who conducted a long-term correspondence with a bookseller (Anthony Hopkins) in 84 Charing Cross Road (1987).On television she won Emmy nominations for Mrs Cage (1992) and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1994), and she played the contessa in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (2003). "I still get deeply involved in the roles I take," she said:Mel gets totally involved when he's writing, too, and I am shut out, alone But life is not all work now. Work is just part of life.After attending the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women she directed a film called The August (1976), but it was never released.In 1977 she and Shirley MacLaine (who had played Gittel in the screen version of Two for the Seesaw) teamed in Herbert Ross's tale of the ballet world and its rivalries The Turning Point. To prepare for the role, she travelled to Israel and accompanied Meir to religious, political and social events "Golda was a legend to me.

Bancroft played a star ballerina (with skilful cutting concealing the fact that she could not perform the steps), and MacLaine was her former colleague and friend who opted for marriage and family. The climactic scene, in which the two thrash out their resentments and accusations, was the dramatic highlight, and Bancroft won another Oscar nomination.She then starred on stage in Golda (1977), a dramatisation by William Gibson of Golda Meir's autobiography, My Life, which won her another Tony nomination. She was a decadent, reefer-smoking countess in Robert Wise's disappointingly flat The Hindenburg (1975) and had a cameo role in her husband's Silent Movie (1976). In 1972 she was cast as the American-born Lady Randolph Churchill in Richard Attenborough's Young Winston, then it was another three years before she starred with Jack Lemmon in Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), based on one of Neil Simon's lesser plays. aren't you?" Bancroft received another Oscar nomination for her performance and, with its haunting Paul Simon score, The Graduate became one of the biggest hits and most iconic movies of the Sixties.She returned to the stage to play Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes (1967), staged by Mike Nichols, but despite consistently outstanding performances, Bancroft's screen work remained sporadic. With Dustin Hoffman achieving stardom as the shy graduate of the title, its best-known scene is the one in which Bancroft, as a close friend and contemporary of Hoffman's parents, crooks her left leg on the stool of her cocktail bar, while Hoffman, framed behind it, awkwardly murmurs, "Mrs Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. Generally disliked at the time, it has since gained a more favourable reputation.Bancroft was then offered (after Doris Day, among others, turned it down) what has become her most famous role, that of the predatory Mrs Robinson in Mike Nichols's acerbic comedy of sexual awakening, The Graduate (1967).

Patricia Neal had started filming in the leading role when she was brought down by near-fatal strokes. Bancroft was rushed in to replace her, re-shooting scenes already shot. An unusual project for the director, telling of a mainly female religious mission in China threatened by a Mongolian warlord, it cast Bancroft as a free-living physician at loggerheads with the prim, repressed lesbian in charge (Margaret Leighton), and it was Ford's last film. She had married a Texan building contractor, Martin May, in 1953, but they divorced in 1957, and she had said in 1962, just before winning the Oscar, "The man I marry, if I do, must accept the fact that I am a totally involved actress."On screen, she starred with Sidney Poitier in a mild thriller, Sidney Pollack's The Slender Thread (1965), in which she was a suicidal woman who takes an overdose of sleeping pills then rings a Samaritan-like volunteer (Poitier) who tries to keep her talking while her location is traced.Her next film, John Ford's Seven Women (1966), was one of her most controversial. Her next Broadway appearance was in 1963 as Mother Courage in the Brecht play, after which she came to the UK to star in Jack Clayton's The Pumpkin Eater (1964), a powerful study (by Harold Pinter from Penelope Mortimer's novel) of a woman having a nervous breakdown, with a superbly modulated performance by Bancroft that won her an Oscar nomination and a shared Best Actress prize at Cannes.In 1964, Bancroft married Mel Brooks, her second husband, and they had a son, Maximilian.