Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson. And Miss Sullivan. And Mrs. Brooks.

Anne Bancroft, the versatile, earthy Oscar-winning actress who seduced Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, tamed Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker and partnered nicely with Mel Brooks for an enduring Hollywood marriage, died Monday of uterine cancer at a New York hospital. She was 73.

"I did what I could and what I wanted to do," Bancroft said by way of summing up a career to the New York Times in 2002.

If not the biggest of stars or the most gossiped-about of names, the determined Bancroft was one of Hollywood's steadiest-working and most acclaimed actresses of her generation. Through the course of her nearly 55-year stage and screen career, she won one Oscar, two Emmys, two Golden Globes and two Tonys.

Bancroft owed the Oscar and half of her Tonys to one woman: Annie Sullivan. The real-life schoolmarm who willed the blind, deaf and previously unreachable Helen Keller to read and write was the inspiration for The Miracle Worker. Bancroft starred as Sullivan in both the 1959 Broadway and 1962 film versions opposite Patty Duke as Keller.

"On most nights we performed, it felt as if we were one," Duke told the Associated Press on Tuesday.

It wasn't The Miracle Worker, though, that made Bancroft a pop-culture touchstone. It wasn't the awards, either. It was a certain arched leg.

In 1967, Bancroft, as desperate housewife Mrs. Robinson, shared cocktails with Dustin Hoffman, as aimless twentysomething Benjamin Braddock, in The Graduate, and with the point of her hose-covered toe, kicked cinema into the modern era.

"Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me, aren't you?" Hoffman's antsy Benjamin asked.

Bancroft's Robinson just laughed.

Nothing in the movies would be the same. Not who would be considered acceptable movie stars--the quirky Hoffman broke through in an era when John Wayne still walked tall. Not what would be considered acceptable nudity--in case Braddock remained unsure about whether he was being seduced, the flash of Robinson's bare breast (a body double's, not Bancroft's) was the clincher. And not what would be considered acceptable soundtrack material--the Simon & Garfunkel-accented score marked the first time outside of a Beatles movie that modern pop songs were used to help drive a storyline.

The most famous of Paul Simon's Graduate contributions was "Mrs. Robinson," named after Bancroft's character, the 1960s generation gap at its catchiest.

In the movie, Mrs. Robinson was twice as old as Benjamin. In real life, Bancroft was just six years Hoffman's senior, 36 to his 30 at the time of the movie's release. That Bancroft, with nothing more than a hair highlight here and there, could make it seem as if she had Hoffman lapped by miles was no surprise to her director.

"Her beauty was constantly shifting with her roles," Mike Nichols said in a statement, "and because she was a consummate actress, she changed radically for every part."

Bancroft, though, was not Nichols' original choice to play Mrs. Robinson; virginal archetype Doris Day was. Even after The Graduate became the box-office hit of 1968, Bancroft wasn't necessarily a "get" for producers. In a 1997 interview with AP, she seemed to speculate that Robinson's predatory nature scared off men, some of whom happen to work in Hollywood.

"More than I know," Bancroft said of the movie's impact on her career. "But I don't have it documented."

Born Anna Maria Italiano on Sept. 17, 1931, in the Bronx, Bancroft toiled in television, sometimes billed as Anne Marno, and undistinguished films, such as Gorilla at Large, through the 1950s.

Her first notable success came onstage in 1958, opposite Henry Fonda in Two for the Seesaw. The play marked her Broadway debut and earned Bancroft her first Tony nomination and win.

The Miracle Worker worked miracles for her film career and brought her more prestigious if not necessarily more popular, vehicles. In all, she scored five Best Actress Oscar nominations. Her honored roles included those in 1965's The Pumpkin Eater, 1978's The Turning Point, 1986's Agnes of God and, yes, The Graduate. Both The Pumpkin Eater, another stage role she recalibrated for film, and The Graduate brought her Golden Globes.

The Emmys came for the 1970 variety special Annie, the Women in the Life of a Man and the 1999 TV movie Deep in My Heart.

Bancroft married outside the Industry in 1953 to Martin May, described in reports as a builder. Whatever May built, it wasn't a lasting union--the two divorced in 1957. Then came Perry Como.

By all accounts, the sweater-clad crooner wasn't a part of Bancroft's romantic life, but he changed it nonetheless. In 1961, Bancroft guested on Como's NBC variety show and 34-year-old writer-comic Mel Brooks watched. Very closely.

"She was wearing a white suit and singing 'Money I Can Always Get.' I fell in love with her then and there," Brooks once told columnist Liz Smith.

The two wed in 1964. In 1972, they had a son, Max, who became a writer for Saturday Night Live.

Other Bancroft-Brooks collaborations included their 1983 remake of the Ernst Lubitsch World War II comedy To Be or Not to Be.

Outside of cameos in Blazing Saddles and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Bancroft did not appear in Brooks' signature big-screen comedies. She did, however, appear in his uncharacteristically somber 1980 Oscar vehicle The Elephant Man, which he helped bring to the screen. On her own, Bancroft wrote, directed and costarred in the 1980 black comedy Fatso, featuring a then relatively svelte Dom DeLuise as a man torn between food and love.

Bancroft appeared with Brooks in last year's season closer of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Playing herself, she was seen toasting, and later ruing, her husband's decision to cast Larry David in Brooks' musical hit, The Producers.

In a 1995 interview for Premiere magazine, Bancroft turned the talk to funerals. Future E! Online columnist Ted Casablanca asked the actress if she wanted a big one. She said she did.

"Who do you want to sing at it?" Casablanca continued.

"Oh, God," Bancroft said. "I'd like my husband to sing at it."

It seems Bancroft just liked the sound of his voice.