Susan Traylor Audio Transcript

Hi, Susan. I wanted to talk to you for a number of reasons, but let’s start with the fact that I just attended Joan Didion’s memorial service two days ago, and you spoke at it so beautifully and told a really amazing story about growing up in L.A. with Quintana and Joan and what a loving mother she was. And I want to get to hear about that time, which seems so golden and interesting. But I know that you were actually born in New York.

Yeah, I was born in New York, on the Upper East Side. My parents were actors, Peggy Feury and William Traylor, and they were in the Actors Studio. And my father went to Los Angeles to act in the movie The Boston Strangler. 

Were they from New York originally?

No, my mother was from New Jersey and my father was from Missouri. But we were seriously Irish people. My mother’s mother came over on the boat as an indentured servant to a doctor at a hospital in New Jersey, and she ended up marrying the man who ran the hospital, who was my grandfather. 

Oh, wow! 

Yeah. And his parents met on the boat coming over from Ireland.

Were they established actors by the time that you were born?

Yeah, they were, in different ways. My mother did a lot of off-Broadway plays and my father did TV out in Los Angeles early on. Then he moved back to New York, and they met through the Actors Studio. But while he went to go do that movie in Los Angeles, Lee Strasberg wanted to open a school in Los Angeles, and he only wanted to be there, I think, in the summer months, and he asked my mother if she would be willing to be the teacher there for the rest of the time and also to teach the class at the Actors Studio in Los Angeles. She thought this would be wonderful for my father’s movie career and a great way to support her two children. We were two and three at the time. So she packed us up and we surprised my father.

So he was in Los Angeles working on The Boston Strangler.

Yeah, he was living with our "uncle Bill." He was a friend of our family in a little apartment on the PCH [Pacific Coast Highway]. And we cried for days because there was no snow and it was Christmastime. 

Oh, no. Did you fly to L.A.?

We flew with my mom, and then—

You packed up everything. You left the apartment as if for good.

Well, the apartment was left there, but we came and we were not going back. So we cried. We were in this little apartment on the PCH. “What happened to all our rooms?” we’d say. And, “What happened to the snow?” So in the middle of the night on our Christmas tree, my dad put laundry detergent all over the Christmas tree for us. 

That eerie Los Angeles Christmas.

And I guess we started to like it. And then Susan Strasberg, who was a great friend of my parents, lived in the Colony in Malibu. And she had a daughter exactly my age, who was my first friend, before Quintana. And [Susan] was going to Rome to do a movie, and so she said, “Well, why don’t you stay in my house while I’m gone?” And my parents liked it there so much and thought it was such a great place to raise a kid. In Malibu Colony, in 1968 this would be, when Malibu was really out there. I mean, Malibu [Colony] is now more like the Calabasas of Malibu, but it’s really grown a lot. So we ended up getting a house right down the street from her in the Colony, and that’s where I grew up.

Were your parents happy to move from New York to Los Angeles? Because I feel like throughout my knowing actors, there always seems to be this divide between Los Angeles and New York, and I wonder if that existed then too. Or was the dream eventually to be out there because of movies?

That’s a very interesting question, but I think my mother was very involved in the theater and came from a different perspective. I think for my father it felt great and liberating, and he really liked it. He took to the late ’60s and ’70s in a slightly different way than my mother did. He was a bit younger than her, and she was a bit of an older mother. So I just think it didn’t hit her in the same way. Not that it divided them, but I don’t think that was totally her design. Although I think she recognized that this was a wonderful place to have a family and be a part of stuff. But, for example, she didn’t know how to drive. You had to take the PCH, which was the scariest road to drive on, all the way to town every day to work. So anyway, she taught at the Actors Studio and was the teacher at the Lee Strasberg [Theatre & Film] Institute until a few years later, and then my parents started their own school.

So first, the Actors Studio or Lee Strasberg?

Well, yeah, those are two separate things. So she was the teacher at the Lee Strasberg Institute, but then the Actors Studio had weekly sessions. So she became…they call it the moderator. They switch off people, but she was often moderating. We lived in Malibu, and if there was no one to look out for us, we’d sit on the floor and watch class, since we were very young. And the other thing about moving, California versus New York, they had a whole world of people from the theater [in New York] and from the Actors Studio. And many people would say when I was little, “The only way we can stand Los Angeles is by coming to your house, because your house is the only house”—which is not true, but—“your house is the only house that has books on the walls and plays to read.” So they said, “We arrive at the airport and make a beeline either for your parents’ theater or to your house just to acclimate to being in Los Angeles.” You know the Woody Allen movie, right? Los Angeles at the time seemed so different to New Yorkers, where everything is normalized now a bit more. 

Yeah. Some of it’s sloshed East. Some of it’s sloshed West. It all feels a little bit different now.

But at the time it was so different. I have a sister called Stephanie Feury. She goes by my mother’s name, but she’s my father’s kid also. And for us, we were so lucky because we were out there in Malibu, but we had all these enormously wonderful, eccentric, intelligent, fantastic, crazy—all those things—people coming through our house all the time. So it wasn’t really as if we were just out there in Malibu; we had the beauty and the wildness of that. But we also had [New York].

You had all these amazing bohemians and actors and writers coming through.

That’s right. And we’d have play readings in our backyard on Sundays. And on this street, the Colony, now it seems like a super fancy place to live, but at the time it was so mixed up with people who were raising families, so they thought it would be good to move out from town. I know the Bel Air fire, before we got there, brought a few families from town. They ended up there with nowhere to live, so they got housed. A lot of actors and musicians, people who wanted to be a little bit outside of things.

So the Colony, was it like a series of bungalows or townhouses? How was it actually structured? 

Well, the Colony is a little street that runs parallel to the Pacific Coast Highway, and you have to enter it through a guard gate. And at the time we moved there, I think it was started in the ’20s or ’30s, and they were just little beach bungalows. There’s some great Roddy McDowall YouTube footage, if you really want to know what it felt like then.

With Lauren Bacall, yeah.

With Lauren Bacall, Natalie Wood. Griffin Dunne is in it as a little kid. Just everybody completely. And they’re all just casual on the beach. The houses were all constructed so that it was about being on the beach. And little by little, so many of those houses got taken down and turned into three-story houses with air-conditioning and televisions. But the way of living of just, “We’re on the beach. Oh, everybody come out to the beach.” And people would, not in a commune-y kind of way but just in a neighborhood-y kind of way. You’d wander in and out of each other’s houses. But a lot of time was spent on the decks and on the beach and in the yards, as opposed to inside with the television with the windows closed. And it was all about looking out at the horizon, I think. I think that’s why everybody moved there, to have an eye on something bigger than what was going on.

Right. Before turning around and looking at Hollywood, they were trying to look out.

Yes. Yeah, I think.

Maybe because of these YouTube shots, I have this idea that it was filled with actors and people from Hollywood. But was it also filled with just normal folk who weren’t connected to the industry?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, Herbie [Babineau], who was the contractor who built a lot of the houses in the Colony, he lived down the street. There were all kinds of people, so it was a great variation. And then people would come in and out, like “Oh, we’re going to live in the Colony, rent houses.” Not now, how they do it for a weekend. They were there for the summer. They’re there for the year. And I think it seemed like such a smaller community from the eyes of a child. Oh, well, there’s Hal Ashby, and Lee Grant lives down there, and they made Shampoo together. But now Hal Ashby is making Coming Home with Jerry Hellman and Bruce Dern, who also live down this street. 

Amazing. 

And it was such a great privilege, because nobody was looking at people in that way in this world. And there were not people seeking people out the way they do now. 

Right. There was a freedom.

It wasn’t like “Oh, these people are famous or not famous.” “Oh, what are you working on?” was the thing you’d asked when you were four years old. Do you know what I mean? And what I really like to say is it was such a beautiful privilege to not be treated like a kid and to get to sit around and listen to how people were working. I mean, I can promise you, when I put all the pieces together, that Lee, whom I’d known my whole life, Lee Grant, up to that point, was in this movie that Hal had made. And now Hal was making a movie with Jerry, and their script meetings would be on the deck right on the beach. And they would work all day long. I mean, this is what they were doing. It was serious. 

And we would be in our bikinis, running out to go in the ocean. But you’d move your hair and listen in. You knew something really extraordinary was going on. And like I said, at my house there would be play readings and actors who were enormously successful and actors who were waiters trying to find their way. And [it was] also really beautiful to observe people. Sometimes becoming successful became too much for them. And some people were so talented and it took so long for them to find their lane. And other than the mountains and the horizon and the ocean and the tide pools and the friends and everything, this was so beautiful, to be able to observe people finding their way and finding community. Because a lot of this stuff we do is lonely too, right?

Usually you think of Hollywood as such a gated place, and the houses gated from each other and it all working through superagents or something, but this seems so much more free-form and organic and alive.

Yeah, and you would go knock on someone’s door or you’d walk into their house. I mean, I’d often come home and just find people in my house, not in a creepy way. In a “you really knew them” kind of way. You know what I mean? I mean, there was a little bit of creepiness, but not—

Well, it was the ’60s L.A.

Yeah, yeah. There was the drug thing going around too, I think, on the side. Now if you go in the Colony, there are a few original houses left. But so many now you have to get buzzed in to get into someone’s yard. Then the doors are locked and the security, the alarms. It feels different. But yeah, if you spend the night there or you spend the day, it starts to feel the same again too.

Is your house still there?

My house is still there. 

And so to talk a little bit about your parents’ careers and their influence. They were actors in their own right and did some great films, but they were also these incredible teachers and acting instructors for a whole fleet of amazing stars. And I wondered how they balanced their own careers as actors with their teaching, or was it all fluid and moved together? 

It’s such an interesting question because my mother would always say, “Well, I honestly never set out to be an acting teacher.” I mean, she was an actress who Lee Strasberg—as the story was told to me because obviously I was a baby at this time—but when he’d have an overflow of people to coach or somebody needed extra help, he’d say, “Ask her if she’d work with them on the side.” So she was doing plays, and I think that was a good thing. And sometimes she was the understudy and sometimes she was in the play. So it was good, but so much of her world at the time was the Actors Studio, and a lot of the plays and stuff she did came from that. 

Like I say, when we moved to Los Angeles, she took that on as a real full-time job, being a teacher, as a way to support her kids [and] know that there’d be constant income. And I don’t know if she ever designed it to be a permanent thing or if it was going to be a temporary solution, but I think it obviously was something that she was enormously gifted at and maybe that just took over. You know what I mean? And she didn’t like being recognized as that because she—

She considered herself an actress.

Yeah. I remember Andy Warhol once wanted to interview her for Interview magazine, and she said: “Well, I don’t like to talk about acting out of context, so I don’t know if I can help you. And I don’t like to talk about other people’s careers, so I don’t know if I can help you.” And he goes, “Well, we’ll find something to talk about.” And I think the big quote was “Well, as an actress, first and foremost, myself, I’m not really interested in other people’s trajectories, and I don’t like to talk about acting out of context.”

But she said—I remember this because this was not long before she died, in the ’80s, when there was a whole group of young people, like a new generation of actors coming, which a lot of people tried to put them down because they weren’t the old school, the old—

Right, a new way of acting.

And I remember her saying, “Well, the new generation is unbelievably talented.” And so, I think, at a certain point she was fascinated with the process. I think somewhere there must have been a shift, that she was taking part in something larger than her own design but never wanted to be named as that. She strangely really rejected that.

Well, so many of these ’70s stars came to your parents and learned their craft that way. I’m always a little confused by the Strasberg method or how that all comes together. But was there something that your parents taught or believed in in terms of acting?

Well, yeah. I mean, like I was saying, Strasberg or Method acting really derived from [Konstantin] Stanislavski, who was a Russian teacher. And before that, [Richard] Boleslawski, right? So it was a real thing about using sense memory as a tool to create environments and things. And so what I think people say is the opposite of that is, do you use your imagination? Or Laurence Olivier would say, “Why don’t you just try acting?” to a Method actor. From my perspective, I think everybody has to have their own thing. I think that all of the terms have become bastardized. And if you walk through that, you cannot do one entirely without the other—it’s add a little bit of this and add a little bit of that.

There are exercises that you can learn. A very basic one: Taste a lemon, and suddenly your mouth puckers up and your eyes water a little bit. That is a basic sensory exercise. Then you go to hot coffee, but you’re just pantomiming. But you feel the heat. And will sweat drip down the side of your face when you do it? If I have to do a love scene with you, Chris, well, so now I remember what Johnny smells like, so I’ll just imagine that Chris smells like Johnny. And I might even sneak some of Johnny’s cologne on Chris’s neck, if I’m really smart. 

I think a lot of my lovers have done that.

I probably am also bastardizing it now. But I always get upset when people…because Lee Strasberg was such an intellect and he would go tell people to listen to a piece of music after they did something also. It wasn’t just “Crawl around and go ‘ah’ like you’re a lion.” But if you’re playing a character who might be a lion, play with that part of yourself if you’re actually a stork. You need to open up as a lion and then use that physicality in there. So these are all exercises to condition you. And some people take it to the extreme and they live in the character. But I think it takes breaking down the walls of your own personality and your own costume you’ve developed yourself to navigate your own life. You’ve got to break that down each time you play a new part. 

And certainly why the Actors Studio was so amazing is it gave a place for people to show up. And my parents’ school was like that. These [were] places you could go, and you would go to class there but there were rehearsal rooms. You could meet with your scene partners and rehearse. You were working. You weren’t just waiting for a job or an audition. And it’s shocking to me how I find a lot of people in this generation: They really want to criticize acting teachers, that they might be breaking something that somebody naturally has a predisposition to and any conflict of personalities that could happen.

But the real gift was the place. There was a place, and there was someone looking over the place and [saying], “Oh, put on a pair of high heels while you’re doing this scene and see how it feels. Oh, go outside and run up the stairs before you come in. That’s how you need to come in the room.” Or, “Go study this painting at the Frick or at the Norton Simon. Drive to Pasadena and see this particular painting or this sculpture and see if that can make an adjustment here.” Having a guide [who] is really great. But I think as much as it was that, it was a place for people to show up and be working on their—

Regularly on their skills.

Their skills, their craft, their instruments, their whatever you want to call it, regularly, until they had no more time.

Obviously you were a child then. You quoted that great Laurence Olivier line. I think it comes from Marathon Man, when he’s working with Dustin Hoffman, who actually did stay up for three days to play the part of staying up. And then [Olivier] said, “Why don’t you just try acting?” That movie is a great example of a shift between two amazing actors of totally different generations and what’s going on in the ’70s. I mean, you were so young. You were growing up at the shift, but did you feel or do you think people felt this great transfer of acting, of quality of acting, or the way that cinema was—

Well, yeah. It came before me. Certainly Marlon Brando broke a lot of those rules down. Al Pacino broke a lot of those, and you can see it. I liken the emergence of that to suddenly seeing a Caravaggio painting in the time. You know what I mean? That’s it. There’s no better or worse, it’s just a new form of expression. And then there are people like Nicolas Cage, who I felt was the Picasso of acting. He wanted to cube things and twist things up, and he’s extraordinary. 

Your parents had a…was it called the Loft, and it was on La Brea? 

Yes. Yeah, yeah. 

And so it was a loft, I’m assuming.

It was. You went upstairs and it was just kind of a big long space. And there was a theater in the front and a big giant rehearsal room in the back, off to the side.

And would your parents work together or were they separate teachers?

Well, my mother did the scene classes and my father taught the sensory work. And then somewhere when I was maybe 13, my dad started doing some scene classes also because it had grown a lot. But the sensory classes were the exercises I talked to you about, and the scenes. But they worked very closely. My father interviewed people. He knew who would be a good fit. I think my mother would have no idea. And he was genius. Sometimes I’d be like, “Dad, you’re going to let that person study with you?”

Oh, so they were choosing who they worked with?

Well, they would have an interview with someone just so it would make sense.

Right. You couldn’t just enroll. You had to be auditioned.

Well, because it’s very destructive to be having this kind of environment with…I mean, it’s not like there’s a pedagogy you have to agree with, but you don’t want to have somebody in there saying, “Well, this isn’t working,” all day long. You want to have somebody who wants to be doing that kind of work, because it’s not step one, step two, step three and then you’re graduated. You come here and you do the work. So I think it was just who was ready to do that. And my father was quite brilliant at sussing that out.

And so it wasn’t like “Oh, I have a film by such and such director and I need to learn how to be this character, so I come to your parents.” It was more of a real commitment to acting.

Yeah, it would be like you were in class. But sometimes, on the side, people who were working on a part would maybe be coached on the part. My mother didn’t want to go sit on the set with somebody. That’s what the director would be doing. You’ve got to be ready to do it by the time you’re there. But I think it’s nice, if you have a huge role, for somebody just to work through [it] with you, so she would do that sometimes too. And so would my dad.

Even though you were way out in Malibu, you grew up in the center of an amazing moment in Hollywood. I wonder, were your parents protective over what you saw? I mean, the late ’60s in Los Angeles, the ’70s in Los Angeles, there were a lot of radical elements as well. And I wonder if they were cautious of raising two girls in Hollywood.

The interesting thing is my parents never made any rules for us whatsoever, but they talked to us so much as we were a part of what was going on that you were instilled to make the right choices. I know they were watching, and we were very much in communication with them. By the time I was in high school, my friends would say, “Do you want to go to a party?” And most of the time I would say, “Well, let me see what my parents are doing first.” That actually was a bit more stimulating, because when you’re allowed to do anything, whatever kids are doing, thinking they’re really doing something special, it gets a little unexciting. Right?

Rebellion is shut down. 

But there were things that I think were just about the time. It was the ’60s, but it was a bit like the Wild West. Our neighbors [would] go to people’s house across the street and they would be having an orgy in their house. 

Really? Oh, God. 

And nobody else was having an orgy that you could see, but there was here. You’d walk and you’d come home. And luckily we were preadolescent, and at dinner we’d say, “Oh, you’re not going to believe what happened today.” And my parents would say, “Well, those are the choices they’re making with their life. Those aren’t the choices we are making with ours.” So they would contextualize it that this [didn’t] need to be the way things went, instead of running over there and screaming at the people, “How could you let my kid…?” Now you’d probably be sued. I’m not advocating [that] people should do this, because I think it was a bit scary as a kid to see this stuff. But I’m so grateful that my parents never shamed me for witnessing or taking part in things. 

Sometimes we’d get in a bit over our heads and, too young, end up at some crazy party and have to call home and say, “I don’t have a ride. Can you pick me up?” And I remember my dad would show up at three in the morning. I mean, this only happened once or twice. And he’d go around and introduce himself to everybody. He was really cool, so nobody flinched. But he was really trying to see what was going on where we were. And then when we get in the car, he’d go, “Okay, kids, so what made you think that was a great idea? Are you glad you did it?” And we’d be like, “Ah, no.” And he goes, “Okay, let’s go home. I’ll make you guys French toast.” It’d be like four in the morning. He would never scold us or get us in trouble. 

So I think the next time around it was honestly embarrassing for him, because they gave us so much that it was embarrassing to let them down, in a way. You know what I mean? And it wasn’t for approval, but it just wasn’t cool. You’d rather spend your time with them, getting the good stuff, than messing it up. Not to say I didn’t mess up just a little bit.

When you were giving your commemoration about Joan’s life, you mentioned being best friends with her daughter, Quintana, and going over a lot and getting a second set of parents from Joan and John [Gregory Dunne]. You met Quintana in school?

Yeah, we were in preschool. We were four years old.

Oh, preschool.

Yeah. And then we went to school in Malibu together at St. Aidan’s until third grade, when St. Aidan’s closed. It was the only private school, or one of two private schools, in Malibu. She lived way up, below County Line, and I lived down in the Colony. So there were three public elementary schools in Malibu. But our parents, we all got together and we went and toured all three schools. Quintana and I, all four parents, and both of us, and my sister too, Stephanie, we would go look at all the schools. They picked Point Dume Elementary, the one in the middle, because it was the smallest of them. 

Quintana and I, we were afraid to go outside of our other school, and we’d be like, “Oh, we heard they have food fights there.” And I remember the first day of school, she had finger sandwiches with the crust cut off, and I had a bag of strawberries and a bag of powdered sugar to dip. And everybody else was eating Hostess CupCakes and Ding Dongs. So we would break food apart inside our brown lunch bag. But within three weeks we were right in the middle of the food fights.

But you would spend a lot of time at Joan and John’s house.

Yes, and Quintana would spend a lot of time at our house. But this beautiful decision-making would go on when it was time for us to go to junior high school, when we graduated sixth grade at Point Dume, where I met my husband, Jesse Dylan. He was in class with Quintana and me. 

Oh, really? 

Yeah. I didn’t know him for the years in between until we re-met.

It’s an amazing community that brought so many lifelong relationships.

It was. There was a lot of craziness, and I think our parents were particularly checked-in for that time period, and they were trying to make sense of what was going on in the world at large, politically, socially, and included us in that conversation. Having our two families was wonderful because there wasn’t just “Oh, you have to do this because your parents say,” because our parents would disagree on stuff sometimes.

Were they friends?

They were friends. They were great friends because they had us, so I think they called upon each other when one of us was going through a phase and would compare notes. And literally, I think, because of John and Joan they’d say, “Well, let’s get together and discuss what the girls are going to do for this summer.” We might have been doing totally opposite things, but somehow this went through the panel because, well, we discussed the possibilities. And sometimes it was in hopes that we would do something. But John and Joan were all for making the plans, and I was very grateful for that because I think my parents felt they always were providing this incredible environment to be in. But you had to find your own footing, so I loved—

The structure.

I loved the structure. And then John and Joan occasionally saying yes or no to some things other people would say no and yes to, by the way. And Quintana loved to be able to find totally her own footing at our house. We didn’t have to report. You know what I mean there. It was less structured.

I remember in one of Joan’s essays, there’s the thing about how she didn’t feel that her daughter was a writer because she didn’t have the same brain that Joan had. 

Joan wrote this?

Yeah, in an essay, I can’t remember the exact quote, I’m paraphrasing badly. But I think that your parents didn’t necessarily want you to be an actress. Is that true?

That is totally true, and it’s funny. My mother kept saying to me, “Well, maybe you’d like to be an oceanographer.” And I’d say, “Excuse me?” And she goes, “Well, think of the life Jacques Cousteau leads.” And she tried to steer me away from it, from becoming an actor.

Why do you think that was? Do you think that they realized that it was just such grueling work? Or do you think that they were worried about where Hollywood was going?

No, I felt they didn’t want [me] to feel like that’s what I had to do because that’s what they did. Because they had an acting school, a lot of people around us were actors and writers and people who I looked up to. This amazing thing is the age gap between me and my parents. Their students, when I was younger, would bridge the gap, and their students wanted to hear what my parents had to say, so then I wanted to hear what their students had to say. You know what I mean? It cut out that judging your parents. I was just like, “Oh, they’ve got something to say.” “Let me get it while I can” is the feeling.

Was it early on—because of seeing all these amazing people create these films and these plays and these works—that you caught that interest? Or was it something that came later to you?

I originally wanted to be a schoolteacher because I like to edit my schoolteachers. I loved them, but I’d be like, “Well, if that kid said that to me, this is what they should say to the kid.” I was so used to listening to my parents talk to actors. They’d come over and hang out on the weekend, and we’d sit there in the middle, listening about their life crisis, I mean, just as friends talk. We somehow were part of this thing, so I wanted to do that. But somewhere along the line, I think knowing people and then seeing their performances and seeing that shift, watching people create characters live in class, even if I was just sleeping with a blanket on the floor, just to watch the whole thing was so fascinating.

Then there was this little thing of seeing Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. They were so glamorous. But that wasn’t really totally part of the life around me, because that was older, in old movies. And I’d be like, “Hmm, those satin sheets look great.” Is that part of being an actor? But then there was this photography book around, A Black and White Photography of American Directors it was called, and Hal Ashby’s portrait was in it. And I realized, Oh, that’s Hal, who lives down the street. 

And then Lee Grant made a film for the [first] AFI Women’s Project. It was a short film of a [August] Strindberg play called The Stronger. And Susan Strasberg was going to be in it, so she had her daughter and me come be extras in it. And Lee was…we all grew up around her when I was young. And so I must have been eight, just going to be in her AFI movie. My parents would not let me be a child professional actor. No, no, no. But—

No Life cereal commercials for you.

No, no. No way. But I could be in Lee’s movie. Sure. I had one line, but I remember Hal Ashby driving down the street in his little red Mercedes coupe. And he said, “Oh, you’re a mighty fine little actress, aren’t you?” And he was so non-perverted and so beautiful and eloquent for every crazy story anybody has to tell about it. He was so beautiful and touching, and there’s something about it. I loved it.

Right, yeah.

And he was so elegant about the way he did it, and it actually gave me a crush on the whole thing. I mean, I have to say it’s a little bit embarrassing, but I understood. I mean, I had one line and we sat there, but we got to wear old turn-of-the-century costumes and have hairdos and—

Oh, wow, the whole works. 

I got to watch, I think it was Susan Strasberg and Salome Jens, and they were doing intense work, doing a Strindberg play. It was no walk in the park. And it just all seemed like that it could come together, and then somebody else you knew would watch it and see, just broke it down at that moment, and I think that was where I was like—

That was the birth of it at eight years old.

Yeah.

And then Robert Redford…wait, am I jumping too far ahead on the acting? 

Go ahead.

So eight years old, but when did you—

So I started studying acting when I was going to Westlake, my last two years of high school. I arranged it with Westlake that I could leave during my free periods—put them together, lunch and free period—two to three times a week. And I would go to my parents’ acting class because suddenly I needed to do this. My parents, I think the last thing they wanted [was] their teenage daughter in the middle of their…you know what I mean, having to deal with it? But I just said, “I’m doing it.”

How many people were in their classes? Was it a group of six or—

No, it was like twenty, thirty. 

So you could get lost a little bit and not just be in this room with your parents. There was a number of students, so you—

Well, I mean, you’d do your scene and it was your mom or your dad giving you the notes.

Were they gentle with you or were they brutal? 

I mean, because I was their daughter, they were enchanted by me, of course. But they made me work hard, and they explained to me that people worked hard to get to this class and that I had to—

Take it seriously. 

I had to take it really seriously. There was no messing around. You had to really show up. I remember I did one scene and my mother was so horrified by it that she said: “All right, so this has so many problems that I never want to see this scene again. What you guys need to work on, which will really help you, and then you could come back to this maybe, but you need to go away and work on this.” Michel Tremblay [is] a Canadian playwright, and it was a scene that involved three people, and it was just above our things.

I mean, that doesn’t sound easy.

So then she gave me something else. Meanwhile, my father would make me do Nina from The Seagull every four months. “Okay, it’s time for Nina again. It’s time for Nina again.” After my mother had died, I came back to Los Angeles for the summer, and he said, “Okay, do Nina again.” And so I did the scene where she runs to the lake late. “I’m drawn here to this lake, like a seagull. My heart is [so] full of you.” And he said nothing afterward. And then he just said, “Sweetheart, I was so ready to tell you you’re not working hard enough, because your life is so full and you’ve got so much going on that I really expected to sit here today and tell you that you need to work harder and you need to put more time and more energy into this.” He said: “What I have to tell you is keep doing exactly what you’re doing, but be patient because there’s not a lot of men your age who you’re going to be on the same playing field as. Because [this] has a lot of complexity going on already. So you just wait till the parts come to you. But really, just stay engaged in this process and it’ll be fun.” 

So I feel like as much as they insisted that I work hard, they would give you the key, too. I remember I did an On the Waterfront scene with Stephen Shellen, who I was in A River Runs Through It with. And my mom, I remember she watched that [On the Waterfront] scene, and she said, “Oh, yeah, you’re like Lalique, and it’s really beautiful.” 

But when she gave me Stephen as a scene partner, I was still in high school. I wore my uniform to school over there every day. And she said: “I’m going to give you a scene to do with this actor, and he’s really going to go into this work in a way that might throw you off balance. But I want you to know you’re strong enough to do this. And if you can stay in with him, I promise you there’s no actor who’s going to ever throw you off again.” Something that occurred that made me go, Oh, this is what my mom’s talking about. And I was like “No way, man. No way.” But then, after both my parents were dead, I got cast in Robert Redford’s movie. When I arrived on the set in Montana of A River Runs Through It, it was the Fourth of July lunch on the day I got there. They drove me straight from the airport to the set because they said I had to get in costume and that Bob wanted me to meet everybody.

He was so gracious. He came and met me at the car, and he walked me around to every actor’s trailer because it was lunch and introduced me to them. When he opened the door for the guy who was playing Emily Lloyd’s brother, it was Stephen Shellen from On the Waterfront. Now I was very nervous at this time. I had not been in a movie this big. And the mountains of Montana were around us. Bob opens the door, Stephen, and [it’s] the same guy in the On the Waterfront scene that my mother had said, “If you can manage this scene with this actor, nobody will ever give you a problem again.” I see him, and we leaped into each other’s arms. And Bob said, “Well, I see no introductions are necessary here. What is going on?” And I just looked at the mountains, and I was like, Wow, I’ve got this. I heard her say, “No actor…” So I had Robert Redford. There was Brad Pitt. There was Tom Skerritt. There was Brenda Blethyn, who’s an extraordinary actress. And I was just like, Oh, I belong here. I can do this, and I have it.