Story Of The Scene: 'The Graduate', Mike Nichols, 1967

Anne Bancroft never quite escaped her role as the middle-aged seductress in The Graduate. Dustin Hoffman, in contrast, went on to have a career of great depth and variety. Anne Bancroft was always Mrs Robinson.

In one of the most famous scenes, Hoffman's character Benjamin is helping Mrs Robinson to undress. She is sitting, he is standing. He reaches over and grabs her right breast, then turns his head away from the camera, walks over to the hotel-room wall and bangs his head against it.

This has always been considered a masterful expression of Benjamin's self-doubt and anxiety. He's seducing Mrs Robinson, for heaven's sake. She's an old family friend. He doesn't know how this will pan out and dread is creeping in. He's thinking of stopping it all right now and leaving.

In fact, the breast-grab was unscripted. Hoffman planned it, he later said, to imitate the fumblings of a schoolboy. The reason Benjamin turns and goes to the wall was actually because Hoffman was laughing; his clumsy foray had been met with a hearty guffaw from director Mike Nichols, standing behind the camera. Hoffman, ever the professional, hid his corpsing and carried on. The scene was later post-dubbed.

Although she was always busy, Bancroft never again reached the heights of The Graduate. To make matters worse, the legs on the iconic poster weren't even hers (they belonged to Linda Gray, later of Dallas). And she was in fact only six years older than Hoffman. She endured make-up to age her and, with the cruelty of Hollywood towards the sight of female ageing, suffered an early eclipse. Everyone thought she was older than she really was.