MARY: Did you all go to school to study acting?

MARLO: I studied with everybody. I studied with Sanford Meisner when I was a teenager …

MARY: Oh, dear, I did too.

MARLO: You probably studied with him at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

MARY: That’s right. I did.

MARLO: I was put under contract at 20th Century Fox. They had a great idea, to put some young people under contract, and then he would teach them. I think it was like a year.

MARY: What year was that? How old was he?

MARLO: Jesus, I don’t remember.

MARY: He was brilliant, but he was also one of the meanest characters that ever walked.

MARLO: He wasn’t mean by that time. I think he was older and he wasn’t mean by then. I also studied with Lee Strasberg for three years and I’d heard he was so mean and he was just delightful. I just adored him.

MARY: I think that in classes they were more like cats with mice.

MARLO: I studied at the Strasberg Institute after “That Girl.” I was offered a part to play an alcoholic and it was called “Crackers.” And it was a wonderful part and it was a wonderful film and I thought to myself, “I don’t really know how to do this.”

MARY: A lot of drinking.

MARLO: What I knew how to do was just sort of be funny, and so it drove me to study more. Without that I would not have been able to play the schizophrenic woman that I played in “Nobody’s Child,” and then all the parts that I played after that. It really does help to have, don’t you think, Lily?

LILY: Well, I didn’t — at 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.

MARY: She had a terrific reputation.

LILY: And she was just so charming as a person. And when she died and they had her memorial, the tributes to her were just wonderful – warm, sweet, funny, hilarious, heart wrenching.

JOAN: What did it mean to each of you to have had the acting training, in your personal and in your professional life, even dealing with agents and producers?

MARLO: I don’t know about agents and producers, but what it does for you in your life is that you know you get to places in yourself that are marked “Do Not Enter,” that have a skull and crossbones on their doors. And you find a way. Strasberg used to say, “Don’t be afraid, because what you’re going to meet on the other side is yourself.” And it’s true. I think that it enriches everything you do. It enriches your comedy and it enriches the drama, because you find more and more in yourself to use. Most of us run from a lot of those places in ourselves. For actors, you have to get back to the way you were as a child, which is to be open about it all; to let it out; to cry and laugh and be surprised and be open and really listen and do all the things that, as we grow up, we don’t do. You know, I was recently in an Elaine May play ["Roger is Dead," George street Playhouse, New Brunswick] and at one point in the play the other actress says to me, “Don’t you listen, Doreen?” And my answer is, “No, not really.” And it gets the biggest laugh of the play, because nobody listens to anybody. It’s just amazing how people love that line. “No, not really.” They fall over. And I think that’s probably one of the problems that we face as people, you know? For me, that’s what all the acting lessons were about, having confidence and going places that maybe —

MARY: Confidence is really, I think, a big issue because whether you’re going to go on in the theater, or whatever in the world you’re going to do, it does give you the ability to use all that you’ve got.

MARLO: At your own will.

MARY: At your own will.