The first deaf actor to win an Academy Award
In 1987, an actor made history by becoming the first deaf winner of an Academy Award and the youngest winner of ‘Best Actress’ all in one fell swoop. Winning an Oscar at only 21 years old completed a meteoric rise for a star who had faced incredible adversity in her childhood and career.
The actor in question, Marlee Matlin, grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and wasn’t born deaf. Instead, due to a malformed cochlea – the spiral-shaped cavity in the inner ear – she suffered so many illnesses and fevers by the time she was 18 months old that she lost all hearing in her right ear and 80% of the capacity in her left ear.
Inspiringly, though, she didn’t let losing her hearing stop her from living life as normally as possible. She once said, “In spite of what most people might have expected from a young girl growing up deaf, life for me was like one long episode of The Brady Bunch. Despite whatever barriers were in my way, I imagined myself as Marcia Brady skating down the street saying ‘hi’ to everyone, whether they knew me or not.”
The young girl went to a school for both hearing and hearing-impaired kids and took up acting at the age of seven. Throughout her childhood and teen years, she performed in many productions held by the International Center on Deafness and the Arts. It was after one of these performances that she met Happy Days star Henry Winkler. He became her mentor, and when she first moved to LA to pursue a career in Hollywood, she stayed in his pool house for two years.
With Winker’s help and support, she soon landed the role that would put her on the map. She would play Sarah Norman, a deaf custodian working at a school for the deaf who begins a romance with a new teacher. The film was called Children of a Lesser God, and it starred William Hurt as teacher James Leeds and Piper Laurie as Sarah’s mother. The movie was a hit at the box office and received five Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Actor’ for Hurt.
However, at the 59th Academy Awards, the only Oscar Children of a Lesser God actually won was ‘Best Actress’. This was still enough to ensure Marlee Matlin would forever be a part of Hollywood history, though.
Marlee Matlin’s Academy Award
Amazingly, Matlin’s win was announced by her co-star Hurt, with whom she was in a real-life relationship. In 2022, she told The Hollywood Reporter that, when he said her name, “I remember thinking at first that he was kidding, but then I thought, ‘He can’t be kidding on national TV!'”
“The win reinforced what Henry Winkler told me when I was 12,” admitted Matlin, “that I should never give up doing what I love, despite the critics and naysayers.”
Horrifyingly, Matlin faced backlash from certain critics at the time, with The New York Observer’s Rex Reed making a particularly shameful and nonsensical claim about her triumph at the Oscars. In 2021, she told The Guardian that Reed said she “won out of pity – that I was a deaf person playing a deaf role; how is that acting?” She was rightly furious and upset about his ludicrous barb and fired back, “There are hearing people playing hearing roles; how’s that any different? That’s what we call ableism or audism.“
Amazingly, 35 years after she made history with Children of a Lesser God, Matlin was part of another film that did wonders for deaf and hearing-impaired actors. She was part of the ensemble cast of CODA, which won ‘Best Picture’, and was instrumental in deaf actors being cast in the deaf parts. In fact, when the film’s financiers pushed back against this idea, she threatened to leave the project. Thanks to her steadfast insistence on authenticity, deaf actor Troy Kotsur was put in the position to become the second deaf actor to win an Academy Award.
Ultimately, Matlin told THR that she would always be grateful for what Children of a Lesser God did for her life and career. She said, “It was a timeless love story, unlike anything that ever came before it, and set the stage for what we see today in CODA.”
