More than two decades after the death of his wife Anne Bancroft, Mel Brooks is opening up about how life has changed without his beloved partner.
In the new two-part documentary Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, premiering Jan. 22 on HBO Max, friends and family reflect on the comedic actor, producer and director’s life after losing his second wife to cancer in 2005.
She had cancer. She beat it. It came back,” Maximillian “Max” Brooks, 53, says about his mother in the two-part documentary. “It was a slow, horrible, lingering time, and anybody who has ever lost a loved one to cancer knows exactly what I’m talking about. We got a bad break, and that’s how [my dad] refers to it.”
Edward “Eddie” Brooks, 66, one of Brooks’ three children with his first wife, Florence Baum (they had three children: Stefanie, 69, Nicholas, 68, and Eddie), also appears in the documentary, and he recalls how his father changed after Bancroft’s death. “All the light went out. He was not in a good place,” Edward says. “We never dreamed that Anne would ever get sick or ultimately pass away. He just worshiped her.”
Both Brooks and his children credit Bancroft — whom he met in 1961 during a rehearsal for The Perry Como Show — for believing in him when his career was uncertain. “She was incredibly supportive of these chances that he was taking, and she was the one to say, ‘I believe in it. I believe in you. Of course you can write the songs, you’re a songwriter,’ ” Eddie, 66, recalls. “If it came from her, it was like the gospel.”
Max, 53, adds, “She was his best friend. It was the two of them against the world. My dad was the water, and my mother was the glass, and when the glass shattered, I was worried the water was going to go everywhere.”
When asked by Judd Apatow, who directed the documentary, what he misses most about Bancroft, Brooks says there are “too many things.” He adds, “Things that nobody in the world would understand. When faced with an unhappy moment, the look on her face. When making up her mind to go somewhere, how fast she turned and moved. It’s hard to explain. There are some things that stay with you forever.”
With time, comedy and support from longtime friend Carl Reiner, who lost his wife Estelle in 2008 and died in 2020, Brooks began opening up again. “My grandpa talks about Annie, my grandmother, a lot more now than he used to when she passed,” his granddaughter Samantha Brooks says in the documentary.
She recalls a recent moment: “We were just sitting on the couch at his house, and he said, ‘I want to show you the movie To Be or Not to Be,’ and we watched it together. We got to watch her singing and performing and being herself together, and that felt like it healed something I didn’t even know was broken.” (The 1983 film starred Brooks and Bancroft.)
Brooks, who considers laughter the greatest medicine, says his life has improved when he’s focused on happiness. “You can’t indulge yourself in being unhappy and miserable because it doesn’t make the pain go away or better,” he says. “You just find something in you that gives you the grit and the courage to get through the bad times that come after somebody you love passes away.”
Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! premieres Jan. 22 and Jan. 23 on HBO Max.
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