Peggy Feury

Peggy Feury, born Margaret Feury on June 30, 1924, in Jersey City, New Jersey, was an American actress who worked in theater, film, and television, and who became one of the most respected acting teachers of her generation. She died on November 20, 1985. Her father was Richard Feury, her mother was an Irish-born woman also named Margaret Feury, and her younger sister was Elinor Feury.

Feury's formal training was extensive. She earned a degree from Barnard College before enrolling at the Yale School of Drama, where she met playwright Louis S. Peterson, whom she married. She subsequently studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio and with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Following her divorce from Peterson and her remarriage, Peterson wrote Entertain a Ghost, a semi-autobiographical play depicting the dissolution of a marriage between a fictional playwright and actress. The Village Voice reviewed the production favorably, calling it "a daring and deeply exploratory new play, the best damned failure I've seen in years."

Her Broadway career spanned 1948 to 1964, during which she performed under the name Margaret Feury. She appeared in Me and Molly; Sunday Breakfast, staged by Stella Adler; Peer Gynt, which starred John Garfield, Mildred Dunnock, and Karl Malden and was directed by Lee Strasberg; The Grass Harp, directed by Actors Studio co-founder Robert Lewis; The Lady of the Camellias, directed by Franco Zeffirelli; The Three Sisters, a Chekhov production also directed by Strasberg, in which Feury eventually replaced Geraldine Page as Olga; and Enter Laughing. She also appeared in The Turn of the Screw, and off-Broadway she starred in Frank Wedekind's Earth Spirit at the Provincetown Playhouse.

Feury was a charter member of the Actors Studio and participated from the outset in its project, undertaken between 1956 and 1969, to record and archive performances of scenes from dramatic literature. Those recordings are now held in the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. She continued her involvement until she relocated to Los Angeles in December 1968.

Her television work began during the Golden Age of Television. In 1961 she appeared in "Murder is a Face I Know," an episode of The Naked City. That same year, in November, she portrayed Martha opposite Shepperd Strudwick's George in an early draft of the first scene of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, presented on the public television program Playwright at Work; the roles would later be originated on stage by Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill, and on screen by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. On October 2, 1977, Feury appeared in Iowa, the second-season premiere of the PBS dramatic anthology series Visions, directed by Lloyd Richards and representing playwright Murray Mednick's television debut. As a nursing home resident whose fragmented recollections connect her granddaughter to her Iowa roots, Feury drew praise from multiple critics: The Hartford Courant judged her performance "by far the best acting performance," The Boston Globe noted her character's shifts "from family feeling to suspicion to self-absorbed recollection," and The Los Angeles Times cited her "almost effortless grace" and "marvelous ferocity." In 1982 she appeared in "Hey, Look Me Over," the Season 11 premiere of M*A*S*H, playing Colonel Buckholtz, a perfectionist colonel who inspects Margaret Houlihan and the nurses.

Her film credits include The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976), directed by Matt Cimber; The Next Man (1976), directed by Richard C. Sarafian and starring Sean Connery; Elia Kazan's The Last Tycoon (1976), starring Robert De Niro; Friday the 13th: The Orphan (1979), directed by John Ballard and based on Saki's short story Sredni Vashtar, in which she played Aunt Martha; Donald Shebib's Heartaches (1981), in which her brief appearance as a doctor was singled out by New York Times critic Vincent Canby, who called her "that very fine actress"; Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion (1984); Carl Reiner's All of Me (1984), starring Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin; and 1918 (1985), written by Horton Foote, which was her final screen performance. In his 2007 study Nightmare USA, critic Stephen Thrower wrote of her performance in Friday the 13th: The Orphan that Feury "demonstrates here how she came to be one of the leading lights in her profession."

In December 1968, at Strasberg's suggestion, Feury moved to Los Angeles with her husband William Traylor and their two daughters. After a period teaching at Jack Garfein's Actors and Directors Lab, she helped establish the west coast branch of the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, serving as both instructor and artistic director until 1973. That year she and Traylor founded their own school, the Loft Studio, on LaBrea Avenue. She had previously led sessions at the Actors Studio in New York when Strasberg was unavailable and had taught her own classes in the building behind Carnegie Hall where Strasberg also taught.

Among the students Feury taught at the Loft Studio was Sean Penn, who arrived at age 18 and attended class twenty-five hours a week for two years. Anjelica Huston, who began studying with Feury in 1981 at age 30, described her as "a revelation" with "a vast knowledge of playwrights" and "an extraordinary gift for making one feel understood," and noted that Feury's feedback was "never destructive" and that "her process was very reinforcing." Feury also coached individual actors in specific roles, including Michelle Pfeiffer for Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983) and Lily Tomlin for her one-woman stage show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. The development of Tomlin's show was documented in a 1986 film in which Feury appeared posthumously, and Tomlin dedicated the film to her memory. From the mid-1970s until her death, Feury and her students frequently presented the work of playwright Horton Foote.