The Leg on The Graduate Poster
1967
Few film posters are as instantly recognisable as the one for The Graduate. A young Dustin Hoffman stands in the background, framed by a woman's bent leg as she rolls on a stocking. Everyone knew whose leg it was meant to be: Mrs Robinson's, played by Anne Bancroft. Almost half a century later, a different actress said the leg was actually hers.
The film and the image
The Graduate follows Benjamin Braddock, a directionless college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman, who is seduced by Mrs Robinson, the wife of his father's business partner, and then falls for her daughter Elaine. Anne Bancroft played Mrs Robinson and Katharine Ross played Elaine; Mike Nichols directed.
The poster boiled that set-up into one picture. As both The Guardian and The Hollywood Reporter describe it, Hoffman watches a woman putting on her hose, and all that can be seen of her is one leg, a hand and part of an arm. Since Mrs Robinson is the film's seductress, audiences naturally assumed the limb belonged to Bancroft; The Hollywood Reporter says most people did.
A claim on live television
In January 2013 Linda Gray appeared on Anderson Cooper's daytime show, Anderson Live, in the weeks after the death of her Dallas co-star Larry Hagman. The Hollywood Reporter and The Guardian both report what she said (The Guardian also mentions the Hagman context): the leg on the poster was hers, not Bancroft's.
Gray explained that Bancroft was simply not there for the photo. 'I think she was absent that day,' she said, as quoted by The Guardian. And the fee? 'I got paid $25. For one leg, that was good.' Both outlets quote that line.
Who was Linda Gray?
Before she became famous as Sue Ellen Ewing, the long-suffering wife of J. R. Ewing in Dallas, Gray had worked as a model. The Guardian lists some of her early bit parts, including 'Girl at Pool with Yellow Swimsuit' in Palm Springs Weekend (1963). Standing in for a star in a publicity shot was ordinary work for a model at the time, and nobody kept the kind of credit that would later have settled the question.
The strangest details
There is a neat twist in Gray's later career. Wikipedia's article on The Graduate lists her among the actresses who played Mrs Robinson in the stage adaptation, taking over the role in the London production in October 2001. In other words, the woman whose leg sold the film eventually played the character the leg was meant to belong to.
Body doubles on posters are rarer than in films themselves, The Guardian notes, but not unknown: it points to the poster for Pretty Woman, which reportedly put Julia Roberts's head on a body double's body.
Myth versus reality
What we can say is that the claim comes from Gray herself, made publicly in 2013, and reported by several outlets at the time. We have not found an independent record from the 1967 shoot, such as a studio document or photographer's note, that confirms it, and we have not found anyone who publicly disputed it either. So the fair way to put it is: by Linda Gray's own account, the leg was hers.
What is beyond doubt is that the poster worked. According to Wikipedia, The Graduate was the highest-grossing film of 1967 in the United States and Canada, and the image of Hoffman framed by that leg is still one of the best-known film posters of its era.
Further reading
- The Guardian: Linda Gray says the leg on The Graduate poster was hers
- The Hollywood Reporter: 'It's My Leg on The Graduate Poster'
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