William dylan

Susan Traylor is from a timeless, Altman-esque dream of California. She’s a Malibu native who comes from acting royalty but stands up as a premiere actress, writer, and director in her own right.

Hollywood insiders will be familiar with Susan by way of her parents, legendary acting teachers who worked with the likes of Sean Penn, Meg Ryan, Anjelica Huston, Nicolas Cage, and Michele Pfeiffer. For decades, they were the people to go to for getting into character. But Susan has her own way into the roles she chooses—with instinctive dialogue and movement. She’s made for herself a diverse and unusual cinematic career working with directors like Gus Van Sant, Robert Redford and Michael Mann. In 2005 she wrote, directed, produced, and starred in a startlingly good feature, an ode to her homeland called Welcome to California.

This month, her latest acting role, in director Stephen Balderson’s The Casserole Club, comes to DVD. The film sees Traylor playing a sympathetic ’60s housewife in Palm Springs named Sugar who get