The five-nominee category in 1963 was, by any reasonable assessment, one of the stronger fields in the history of the Best Actress category. The contest between Davis and Bancroft that the rivalry narrative has made it into was real—both women’s performances attracted the most publicity—but it was not the totality of what the category contained.
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THE MIRACLE WORKER: WHY BANCROFT WON AND WHAT THAT MEANS
It is worth spending some time on *The Miracle Worker* itself—on what Arthur Penn’s film actually is and why it produced the response it produced—because the film tends to be referenced in accounts of the 1963 Oscar night primarily as the vehicle for the ceremony’s proxy drama, rather than as a significant work of cinema in its own right.
The story of Annie Sullivan’s work with the young Helen Keller—Sullivan’s arrival at the Keller home in Tuscumbia, Alabama in 1887, her gradual establishment of a disciplined relationship with a child who had been allowed to run wild, and the climactic moment at the water pump when Keller finally connected the physical sensation of water with its language representation—had been a celebrated piece of American mythology since Helen Keller’s autobiography and Sullivan’s own accounts circulated in the early twentieth century. William Gibson had written a stage version that focused on the relationship between teacher and student rather than on Keller’s later public life, and the resulting play had run on Broadway for more than a year before the film version.