Peggy Feury (born Margaret Feury; June 30, 1924 – November 20, 1985)[1] was an American actress on Broadway, in films, and on television. She became a highly regarded acting teacher in New York and then in Los Angeles. Throughout her career, she taught many notable students.
While at Yale, Feury met and then married her first husband, playwright Louis S. Peterson.[5][a] Less than a decade later, following their divorce and Feury's remarriage, Peterson's semi-autobiographical play Entertain a Ghost was produced, chronicling a deteriorating marriage between a fictional playwright and actress with obvious parallels to Peterson and Feury.[6] The play received from the Village Voice a positive and detailed review that expressed the feeling that the production should have run longer. It described it as "a daring and deeply exploratory new play, the best damned failure I've seen in years".[7][8]
Between 1956 and 1969, the Actors Studio undertook a project to record and archive work that was being done there, including performances of scenes from dramatic literature. These recordings have been archived as part of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections.[20] Feury participated in this project from its inception until her relocation to Los Angeles in December 1968.[21]
Feury appeared in a number of television dramas beginning in the Golden Age of Television,[22] including, in 1961, a significant role she played in “Murder is a Face I Know”, an episode from The Naked City, which can be found on the internet.[23][24]
On October 2, 1977, Feury appeared in Iowa, the second season premiere of Visions, PBS's Peabody Award-winning dramatic anthology series; it was directed by Lloyd Richards, and was playwright Murray Mednick's television debut.[27] The critical reaction was disappointment,[28][29] but the actors fared better, Feury in particular. As the unwilling nursing home resident whose disjointed recollections provide her granddaughter an invaluable connection to her Iowa roots, Feury's portrayal was judged "[b]y far the best acting performance" by The Hartford Courant.[30] Her performance, as the character veers "from family feeling to suspicion to self-absorbed recollection" – was noted by The Boston Globe,[31] with The Los Angeles Times citing her "almost effortless grace" and "marvelous ferocity."[32] Critic James Wolcott writes:
One scene teems with unruly life: Eileen visits her grandmother (Peggy Feury) in the nursing home, and the grandma's semi-senile outbursts have a crazy, cawing theatricality. "This is a cattle yard," says Feury's crone as the camera stares down the discarded people. "Bellowing, constant bellowing." Another patient – babbling "Operator, operator, operator" – is wheeled across the screen and grandma, like an Alice-in-Wonderland queen, issues a command: "Choke her!" This disreputably funny scene is capped when a nurse happens by and – perfect joke – turns out to be a Lily Tomlin lookalike.[28]
In 1982, Feury appeared as "Colonel Buckholtz," a perfectionist colonel who inspects Margaret Houlihan and the nurses in "Hey, Look Me Over," the opening episode of M*A*S*H Season 11.
By far Feury's most substantial film role (in terms of both sheer size and importance to a film's narrative) came in a little seen low-budget psychological horror film – John Ballard's Friday the 13th: The Orphan (1979), based on the short story Sredni Vashtar by Saki.[37] In Nightmare USA (his 2007 study of lesser-known American exploitation filmmakers), Stephen Thrower writes:
Then there's Peggy Feury, a skilled and thoughtful actress who demonstrates here how she came to be one of the leading lights in her profession. (She taught acting at the Actors Studio, alongside Lee Strasberg.) The role of Aunt Martha is already well-written, but Feury brings her own amazingly subtle shadings to the part.[38]
Teacher
Feury was a charter member of the Actors Studio[3] and frequently led sessions there when Lee Strasberg was unavailable.[39][40] She also taught her own classes in the same building where Strasberg taught, behind Carnegie Hall.[41]
In December 1968, at Strasberg's suggestion, Feury moved to Los Angeles with her husband William Traylor and their two daughters.[42] After a brief stint teaching at Jack Garfein's Actors and Directors Lab,[43] Feury helped establish the west coast branch of the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where she would double as instructor and artistic director [44] until 1973, when she and Traylor started their own acting school, the Loft Studio, on LaBrea Avenue.[4][45]
Sean Penn was 18 when he arrived at the Loft;[46] he remained for two years, attending class twenty-five hours a week.[45] Feury's "very gentle," "very personal" approach quickly won over the fiercely independent young actor, as did her emphasis on discovering "how [to] bring yourself to the material rather than the material to you."[46] To Anjelica Huston, who began her studies in 1981 at age 30,[47][48] Feury was "a revelation," with "a vast knowledge of playwrights" and "an extraordinary gift for making one feel understood."[49] Huston describes her teacher as "beautiful," " quite small and delicate," with a "half way to heaven look." On the other hand, notes Huston, Feury was "extremely intelligent and mordant, Irish, with certain very visceral preferences", and yet had "a way of commenting on a scene that was never destructive. [Even when] you knew she thought it was pretty terrible, she had a way of translating it positively to actors – her process was very reinforcing, I think."[47]
Feury was occasionally called upon to coach an individual actor in a role, as she did Michelle Pfeiffer in Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983)[50] and Lily Tomlin in her one-woman stage show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.[51][52] The evolution of Tomlin's show formed the basis of a 1986 documentary in which Feury appeared posthumously;[53] Tomlin dedicated the film to her memory.[51]
From the mid 1970s [54][55] until her death, Feury and her students frequently showcased the work of playwright Horton Foote, presenting four of his plays in their entirety[33][55][56] plus a number of individual scenes from Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle.[33] In 1984, in her final film role, Feury was cast in the film version of Foote’s 1918, the seventh of The Orphans' Home Cycle's nine plays.[34][57]
Feury struggled with narcolepsy. When she would come out of one of its spells she could be lucid as though she had been alert during the episode.[101] She died Wednesday, November 20, 1985 in a car accident, a head-on collision, in West Los Angeles.[61]
Stage credits (partial listing)
These are acting credits except where otherwise indicated.
^ Peterson first came to prominence in 1953 with the production of his play, the coming-of-age tale, Take a Giant Step. Peterson would go on to write scripts for TV and film.[5]
^Francis, Bob. "'Sunday Breakfast': Review". The Billboard. 7 June 1952. "[The Deckers] seem a scurvy lot of thoroughly uninteresting folk [but] good actors have taken on the Decker family chores [including] Margaret Feury as [Decker's] shrewish, self-centered wife."]
^McNally, Owen. "TV: New 'Iowa' Taps Roots Theme". The Hartford Courant. October 1, 1977. "No doubt 'Iowa' is far superior to most TV fare. But 'Visions' isn't to be judged by that sort of pathetic measure. The Peabody-Award-winning series has to be judged by its own very high standards of excellence."
^McNally, Owen. "TV: New 'Iowa' Taps Roots Theme". The Hartford Courant. October 1, 1977. "By far the best acting performance is turned in by Peggy Feury as the grandmother. She makes the old woman's recollections of Iowa credible and displays a fine, irascible edge whenever she comes on strong like a harridan or a Hamlet feigning madness."
^Henry 3rd, William A.. "'Iowa' Play Leads Series". The Boston Globe. October 1, 1977. "If, as Yeats once suggested, every play is written for the sake of a single scene, 'Iowa' was written for the tender scene between a sensitive girl recovering from a breakdown and her tough, addled grandmother. The old woman veers from family feeling to suspicion to self-absorbed recollection of her girlhood - recollection from which the granddaughter somehow draws a sense of her own continuity and place. [...] The performances, however, are remarkable, particularly by Carol Fox as the girl and Peggy Feury as the grandmother."
^Smith, Cecil. "Dramas Mark the Greene-ing of Sunday Eve". The Los Angeles Times. September 28, 1977. pp. "Under Rick Benewitz's direction, it is performed with an almost effortless grace, most memorably in the fury of Peggy Feury. [...] Grandma's not dead; she's been moved to a rest home, where she lives amid other blank-eyed old people waiting for death. She's played with marvelous ferocity by Peggy Feury, a snarling whirlwind of an old woman with an Irish brogue in a wheelchair, hiding the chocolates she lives on under her shawl."
^Oakley, James. "Susan Traylor's LA Story". Interview Magazine. July 11, 2012. "So after my dad came to Los Angeles, Lee suggested she go out too, because he wanted to open a teaching studio there. She brought us out and surprised my dad. [...] It was Christmastime, and we were so sad because there was no snow. My sister and I took soap and put it all over the Christmas tree. Susan Strasberg was living in the Colony, but she was going to Italy to make a movie, so she let us stay in her house while she was away." See also:
Strasberg, Susan. "Part Four". Bittersweet. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. pp. 250-251. ISBN0-399-12447-0. "When I returned to Los Angeles, I found a home in Malibu Colony, a private group of about seventy-five houses. [...] No sooner had we settled into this paradise than I was offered not one but two films in Europe; one to be shot in Italy, the other in France. [...] Two old friends, Peggy and Bill Trayler [sic], had decided to come to California with their daughters, Susan and Stephanie. They needed a place to stay, so I sublet my home to them. [...] The film, The Sisters, was about two siblings, very melodramatic and Italian, but I enjoyed the work in spite of the plot."
^Huston, Anjelica. "The Big Fabulous". Vanity Fair. December 2014. "Eventually I began working with Peggy Feury, of the Loft Studio. I was, at 30, the oldest person in her novice class. For the next couple of years, every day, five days a week, I drove from my house to her studio on La Brea."
^"Stone and Others Talk 'Scarface': Article in December Issue of 'Playboy' Covers the Making of De Palma Classic". De Palma a la Mod. December 8, 2011. "[Steven] Bauer says, De Palma 'made Michelle feel like a scared, lonely little girl in a world of men. He did the right thing, but it was hard to watch. That poor girl was always alone, always on edge, very vulnerable, brave but alone in her performance. She lived on the phone with her acting coach Peggy Feury. She needed some kind of lifeline.'"
^Tomlin, Lily. "‘People Would Look at Me … Horror-Stricken’". wowOwow. June 11, 2008. "[A]t the end I had begun studying with Peggy Feury who was a studio actress who had come out to the West Coast to found the West Coast chapter of The Studio. She and I were in “All of Me” together, and we just became great friends. And I was sort of possessive of her; I could hire her privately and she would work with me and we became like girlfriends. And then I’d feel so self-conscious and pig-like when I’d see her in class sometimes, because I felt like I was so close to her. And everybody revered her. They adored her."
^Grimwood, Michael. "Works Listed". Heart in Conflict: Faulkner's Struggles with Vocation. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. p. 346. ISBN0-8203-0855-2.
^ abcd"Peggy Feury". The Orlando Sentinel. 24 November 1985. "Feury, who was in her 40s, also coached Meg Tilly, Nicholas Gage [sic], Michelle Pfeiffer, Melissa Gilbert, Hart Bochner and Michelle Meyrink."
^ abcParker, Sachi (2013). "The Acting Bug". Lucky Me: My Life With--and Without--My Mom, Shirley MacLaine. New York: Gotham Books. p. 155. ISBN978-1-101-61656-7.
^"Vonetta McGee: 'I always felt a false sense of security'". The Los Angeles Times. May 6, 1979. p. 33. "She has been a student of Peggy Feury for three years. 'I keep busy in my classes. When I started in films, I didn't really know what I was doing, though it was fun. I now understand the art.'"
^Hirsch, Foster (1984). "The Actors Studio on Stage and Film". A Method to Their Madness: The History of The Actors Studio. New York: Da Capo Press. p. 253. ISBN0-306-80268-6. In the summer of 1954, A Hatful of Rain was presented at the Studio for five performances.
^Calta, Louis. "RIDGEFIELD WINS GRANT FOR PLAYS; Chicago Author Garners First Annual $1,000 Prize Offered by American Productions". The New York Times. February 8, 1955. "The script had its beginnings with the Actors Studio, which presented it for five performances with a cast including Mr. Gazzara, Frank Silvera, Paul Richards, Peggy Feury, Anthony Franciosa, Carroll Baker and Henry Silva.."
^Lyons, Leonard. "The Lyons Den". The Reading Eagle. March 11, 1958. "'A Hatful of Rain' was done originally at the Actors Studio, with Carroll Baker playing the wife."
^Cast for the Woodland Hills Community Theatre's production of Horton Foote's 'The Chase'. WVPlayhouse.com. "His association with playwright Horton Foote goes back to the mid seventies when he appeared in a special adaptation of William Faulkner’s short story Old Man that Mr. Foote reworked from his own Playhouse 90 TV Screenplay of the same title. The local production was produced at the Loft Studio under the direction of legendary acting teacher, the late Peggy Feury."
^Drake, Syvie. "'Totem Pole' at L.A. Actors' Theater". The Los Angeles Times. June 18, 1980.
