Marlee Matlin

The Night Silence Won the Oscar

Marlee Matlin took the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in March 1987. She didn't hear the applause, but she felt the vibration of the floor beneath her feet. That night, the Academy gave her the Oscar for Best Actress for Children of a Lesser God.

She was only twenty-one years old.

Before she turned two, she lost nearly all of her hearing due to a poorly treated illness. She grew up in a Jewish household in Illinois, where her parents refused to send her to a specialized institution. They wanted her to get by in the real world, and that decision forged a personality that often clashed with the expectations of Los Angeles producers.

Her film debut was a lucky accident. She was discovered in a small play in Chicago, and shortly afterward she was filming alongside William Hurt. The shoot was tense, and the personal relationship that developed between them was marked by abuse and toxicity. Hurt even questioned whether she deserved the award, since other actors with more years of experience were waiting in line.

But Matlin didn't stop to ask for permission.

The Myth of the Perfect Debut

After winning the most prestigious award in film, the industry didn't know where to place her. The scripts that reached her desk were limited, and they almost always required that her deafness be the central focus of the conflict. During the 1990s, she had to fight for roles that weren't written specifically for a deaf person.

In 1991, she accepted the role of prosecutor Laurie Bey on the series Reasonable Doubt. It was a smart move, because television allowed her to prove she could keep up with the pace of a weekly production. She worked on more than forty episodes and earned two Golden Globe nominations in consecutive years.

And then Aaron Sorkin arrived. The creator signed her for The West Wing in 2000 to play Joey Lucas. Her character was a cynical, brilliant political consultant who never let anyone finish their sentences. In the halls of the fictional White House, Matlin found room to display a irony that film had denied her.

Because her sign language was not a barrier but a rhythmic tool.

Maturity in Front of the Camera

Over the following decades, she took part in projects as different as The L Word and Switched at Birth. She never stopped working, but movies seemed to forget her for a long period. In 2009, she published her memoir titled I'll Scream Later, in which she candidly recounted her struggles with addiction and the episodes of violence she experienced early in her career.

In 2021, the premiere of CODA at the Sundance Film Festival put her name back on the covers. The film told the story of a family of deaf fishermen, and Matlin insisted that all actors playing deaf characters be deaf in real life. She threatened to walk away from the project if the studio hired hearing actors for those roles.

The gamble paid off.

The film won the Oscar for Best Picture, and she regained her place at the forefront of the industry. In 2023, she took a step further and made her directing debut on the anthology series Accused. She directed the second episode of the first season, titled Ava's Story, where she led a cast that used sign language in most of its scenes.

Filming that episode in Toronto lasted exactly twelve days with a crew of eighty people.