The Miracle Worker: Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan

Sullivan later wrote: “I have not enjoyed myself. . . In imagination I saw my forebears working in those hills . . . trudging barefoot to their comfortless thatched cottages or, driven by extreme poverty, trekking toward a port from which they would sail to distant lands.”
Sullivan ultimately experienced Ireland “through a lens, a curtain, of her unresolved past and her current expectation of death,” Nielsen writes.

Annie Sullivan died six years later at the age of 70.

 

New Life on Stage and Screen

The Keller-Sullivan saga received new life in the late 1950s, when William Gibson wrote a TV drama called The Miracle Worker. In 1959, The Miracle Worker made its debut on Broadway, starring Anne Bancroft (born Ann Marie Louisa Italiano) as Sullivan and a young actress by the name of Patty Duke as Keller.

In 1962, Duke and Bancroft revived their roles on screen, in a film directed by Arthur Penn, who would go on to direct the classic film Bonnie and Clyde as well as Little Big Man and Alice’s Restaurant.

The Miracle Worker was a cinematic smash.  Bancroft and Duke (who was just 16) both won Academy Awards.  (This was possible because Duke was categorized as a supporting actress.)  In the film, Sullivan’s Irish heritage is noted in her accent, though some viewers might note that the accent tends to come and go, and seems more a strange blend of Irish, English and Bostonian.
Interestingly, the Queens-born Patty Duke was, herself, the daughter of a troubled Irish American whose background was somewhat similar to Sullivan’s own.  Fittingly, in a 1970s TV version of The Miracle Worker, Patty Duke played the role of Annie Sullivan.
This March, another New York-born Irish American, Abigail Breslin, will play Helen Keller on Broadway.

 Over a century after she rescued Helen Keller from a life of emptiness, Annie Sullivan is still performing miracles. Twenty years ago, The Annie Sullivan Foundation for Deaf/Blind People was founded in Dublin. Organizers chose the name, in part, because Annie and her great works were “almost unknown” in Ireland. Today, visitors to the Stillorgan-based foundation’s center can see Annie Sullivan’s legacy in action.

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Nster.com