William Traylor
William Hurley Traylor Jr. taught more famous actors than he ever appeared alongside. With his wife Peggy Feury he founded The Loft Studio, whose students included Sean Penn, Anjelica Huston and Nicolas Cage, and two of his daughters, Stephanie Feury and Susan Traylor, went into acting.
His own screen record opens with an uncredited soldier in The Last Frontier in 1955 and runs through several decades of the parts a teacher of acting can take without embarrassment. He is a Pinkerton in The Long Riders, Sackett in The Postman Always Rings Twice, an inspector in The Man with Two Brains, General Catburd in Buckaroo Banzai, Arnie Carr in The Boston Strangler. The register is administrative menace: men with clipboards and jurisdictions, delivered without ever pushing.
The nicest detail in the filmography is that he plays an Underhill in both Fletch films, four years apart, which is either continuity or a private joke, and either way it is the sort of thing that happens to actors who are good company on set. This is a supporting career in the fullest sense of the phrase, and the students are the larger legacy.
Movies (13)
- The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
- Fletch (1985)
- The Man with Two Brains (1983)
- The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)
- The Long Riders (1980)
- Fletch Lives (1989)
- Dead Bang (1989)
- The Boston Strangler (1968)
- Cisco Pike (1972)
- Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
- The Last Frontier (1955)
- The Execution of Private Slovik (1974)
- Smile (1975)
TV (4)
Where to start with William Traylor
You will spot him fastest in Fletch, where he is on the receiving end of the Underhill business, and the film remains the loosest thing Chevy Chase ever did well. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is the cult object, and he plays General Catburd with the straight face the film badly needs from somebody.
For the serious side, The Postman Always Rings Twice is the 1981 remake with Nicholson, hot and slow and better than its reputation, and The Boston Strangler is the split-screen procedural that still looks modern. The Long Riders is the Walter Hill western with the casting gimmick, Smile is the underseen satire worth chasing down, and The Man with Two Brains is the silliest thing here by a wide margin.