It also revived the Hollywood viability of Penn, whose only film to that point, 1958’s “The Left Handed Gun,” was re-edited against his wishes and ended up a flop. It turned out well, launching the film careers of Bancroft and Duke, who won the Academy Awards for best actress and supporting actress, respectively. But Penn stuck with his leading lady, as well as Patty Duke reprising the role of Helen, even though she was 15 years old by then. This provided the impetus for a film version, though at first the studio wanted a bigger star than Bancroft, suggestion Elizabeth Taylor instead. William Gibson turned it into a television play in 1957, and then a smash Broadway hit in 1959 that won Tony Awards for Gibson, Bancroft and director Arthur Penn. Keller became famous in the early 1900s for her scholarship and writings, especially her 1902 autobiography, “The Story of My Life.” (Less well remembered these days is her political activism and embrace of socialism.) She and Annie became lifelong companions, and her autobiography chronicles their journey from the time they met when Helen was 7 until about age 22, when she became the first deaf-blind person in America to graduate from college. For the record: Bogie never actually says “Play it again, Sam” in “Casablanca,” either. I seem to recall a “South Park” segment in which teacher Annie Sullivan repeats the line, “Water, Helen, water!” to blind-and-deaf student Helen Keller as she magically makes the connection between objects in her world and the words that have been spelled out by hand to her, and then the student chorus picks it up for a kicky musical number.īut like many lines from the movies that have become immortal, Annie (Anne Bancroft) never actually says those words in the film - at least not in that sequence and context.

I knew the film mostly through its various spoofs and references. “The Miracle Worker” is one of those works that has become a staple of popular culture even though many people today haven’t actually seen the movie or the play that originated it… including me.

The miracle worker movie