Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft Lived a Fairytale Romance Until Her Untimely Death

Falling in the kind of love that fills fairytales is not something everyone gets to experience. The kind of love that fills you with joy, uplifts you, and carries you through life, light as a feather despite the challenges you might face.

So, when two people share that kind of love, it emanates from them.

Legendary actor and comedian Mel Brooks enjoyed just such a love with his wife, Anne Bancroft, a famed actor in her own right.

Even though Anne passed away decades ago, their relationship is still alive in Mel's heart as he approaches the milestone of being a centenarian. Here's what we know about their relationship timeline and how Mel has coped since losing his beloved partner in crime.

Anne is actually not Mel's only wife. He was first married to Florence Baum in 1953. They share three children: Stephanie, Nicholas, aka "Nicky," and Edward, aka "Eddie."

But in 1964, he married the woman who would turn out to be the love of his life: Anne. With her, he would later welcome his fourth but their only child: Maximilian, aka Max.

In an old interview, the late Anne mused on the first time she met Mel in 1961. She recalled that while she was in the middle of a performance run of The Perry Como Show, "A guy from way over on the other side of the theater said, 'Hey, Anne Bancroft. I'm Mel Brooks.'" She added that in two years on that run, no man had ever approached her "with that kind of aggression," musing that she thought they were intimidated by her.

She recalls his voice coming from the darkness and picturing a man who looked like Clark Gable and Robert Redford.

"Turned out to be Mel Brooks," she said in disbelief, adding sarcastically, "And he never left me." She describes him doggedly pursuing her, not giving up until they were deeply in love.

In a two-part documentary on HBO Max called Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man!, Anne and Mel's son Max mused on their early relationship, saying that they were best friends and his mother was always supportive of his father's dreams and schemes.

In their later years, Anne was diagnosed with cancer. In the documentary, Max recalls, “She had cancer. She beat it. It came back. 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" (excerpt via People).

Anne eventually lost her second battle to cancer in 2005.

Although they've been parted by death for over two decades, Mel still misses his best friend. In the documentary, Mel and Anne's granddaughter, Samantha Brooks, mused on Mel's grief journey through the years, saying, “My grandpa talks about Annie, my grandmother, a lot more now than he used to when she passed."

She explained that once, "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.”

And despite missing his wife, Mel muses in the documentary, “You can’t indulge yourself in being unhappy and miserable because it doesn’t make the pain go away or better. 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.”