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How actress Marlee Matlin proved the critics wrong

By Harry Funk Staff Writer Hfunk@thealmanac.Net 3 min read
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Hollywood buffs are familiar with Marlee Matlin for her winning the 1986 Academy Award for Best Actress at the tender age of 21.

Buffs also are familiar with how tough a town Hollywood can be, as Matlin learned for herself the morning after the Oscars by way of a film critic’s column that chalked her “Children of a Lesser God” victory up to the “pity vote.”

“Here’s a deaf person in a deaf role. So how’s that really called acting?”

The below-the-belt punch certainly landed.

“For the first time in my life,” Matlin recalled, “I began to feel that I was, quote-unquote, handicapped.”

As the opening speaker for the 49th season of the Town Hall South Lecture Series, Matlin communicated in American Sign Language while her longtime interpreter, Jack Jason, presented her words for the benefit of the non-signers in the Upper St. Clair Theater on Oct. 3.

Until the critic’s pronouncement that pretty much labeled her as a one-trick pony, she had received the utmost of encouragement, first from her parents: Donald and Libby Matlin were pioneers in mainstreaming, making sure that Marlee went to neighborhood schools and, to the extent possible, making sure that she led the life of any other girl growing up in suburban Chicago.

“A reporter once described my childhood as one long episode of ‘The Brady Bunch,'” Matlin, who tended to think of herself as playing the Marcia role, said. “And he was right.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, she decided she wanted to be an actress and attended the International Center On Deafness and the Arts in Northbrook, Ill. One day, she learned that the most famous person in American would be visiting, “even more famous than the president.”

That turned out to be Henry Winkler, who was riding his ’70s tidal wave of popularity as The Fonz. What his fans didn’t know was that he had gone through quite a bit of adversity as a boy, with undiagnosed dyslexia leading to his elders questioning his intelligence. And so he told young Marlee:

“You can be whatever you want to be if you follow your heart. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

When that particularly critical critic – and by extension, much of Hollywood – did tell her otherwise, Winkler and his wife, Stacey, were there for Matlin. They invited her to stay at their home, all the while providing the encouragement that has led to her continuing success as an actress.

Along the way, she has become a tireless supporter of a variety of causes, with an especially notable achievement on behalf of Americans who are deaf and hard of hearing: She successfully fought for digital streaming services to include closed captioning with their programming or be subject to the same penalties as traditional broadcast television.

Meanwhile, her own TV career has blossomed, from her 1993 guest role on “Seinfeld” to the recently ended six-year run of “Switched at Birth” to “Quantico,” a series she’s ready to film in which she plays a deaf FBI agent.

“Today, it’s been 30 years since Hollywood announced me as DOA, dead on arrival,” she told the packed audience in Upper St. Clair. “And I’m still here.”

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