Marlee Matlin and the Oscar that changed almost nothing for deaf actors

Marlee Matlin

Photo: Adam Chitayat / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 24, 1965 Morton Grove, Illinois, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	CODA, The Player, Children of a Lesser God
Awards	Academy Award · Golden Globe · SAG Award (shared) · Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame · Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion

When William Hurt opened the envelope for Best Actress, he was reading the name of his own co-star, and the archive footage still shows how little he seemed to enjoy it. Marlee Matlin walked up to collect the statuette for Children of a Lesser God, the youngest woman ever to win the category and the first deaf performer to win an Academy Award at all. She signed her thanks. Then Hollywood, having handed her its highest prize, spent the next three decades failing to write her a film part worth the name.

That is the paradox her career keeps returning to. The Oscar made her the most recognizable deaf woman in the world and, almost in the same gesture, an exception the industry could point to instead of changing. The deaf actor who would join her as a winner did so more than three decades later, in a film she fought to cast honestly. Today Matlin is less interested in being the exception than in producing the stories that would make the word unnecessary.

The girl who went into the industry’s history books started out in the suburbs north of Chicago. Matlin was born in Morton Grove, Illinois, on August 24, 1965, and lost most of her hearing at 18 months after an illness and high fever; she remains the only deaf member of her family. She grew up in a Reform Jewish household, learned her Torah portion phonetically for her Bat Mitzvah and at seven played Dorothy in a children’s production of The Wizard of Oz staged by the International Center on Deafness and the Arts. Henry Winkler saw her in one of the company’s shows. Years later he would host her wedding.

The audition that changed everything was for the screen version of Mark Medoff’s play, whose Sarah Norman was based on the Tony-winning deaf actress Phyllis Frelich. Matlin was 19 during the shoot, a newcomer opposite an established star, and her Sarah, a deaf woman who refuses to speak for the comfort of the hearing man who loves her, carried the film. One critic compared her to the great performers of the silent era. Released in October 1986, Children of a Lesser God brought her a Golden Globe and, at the ceremony in March 1987, the Oscar.

What came next was a lesson in how narrow the welcome had been. When Matlin presented Best Actor a year later, she spoke the nominees’ names aloud instead of signing them, and the Deaf press turned on her; Silent News ran the controversy across its front page. She had grown up both speaking and signing, and has said the backlash shocked her. The episode fixed a double bind she never fully escaped: too deaf for most casting directors, not deaf enough for some of her own community.

Television gave her the work the cinema withheld. She led Reasonable Doubts as a deaf prosecutor, earning two Golden Globe nominations, and collected Emmy nominations for guest turns in Seinfeld, Picket Fences, The Practice and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She became Joey Lucas, the political pollster who sparred with the staff of The West Wing, then sculptor Jodi Lerner in The L Word and Melody Bledsoe, a deaf mother in Switched at Birth. In 2015 she made her Broadway debut in the Deaf West revival of Spring Awakening.

The canonised version of that path is a triumph. The more accurate one is that Matlin rarely got leading film roles after her debut, and her own film has aged in ways she now names openly. Marking the 40th anniversary of Children of a Lesser God, she told Gold Derby: “I think there are a lot of subjects here that people, not only deaf and disabled, but just people are uncomfortable with.” The private story was darker still. In her 2009 memoir, I’ll Scream Later, she wrote about the drug addiction that took her to the Betty Ford Center and alleged that Hurt, her co-star and partner of two years, physically abused and raped her. The 2025 documentary about her life revisits that Oscar night with those allegations in plain view.

CODA was where the argument began to turn in her favor. Cast as Jackie Rossi, the mother of a fishing family in which only the teenage daughter can hear, Matlin pushed for the deaf roles to go to deaf actors. The film won Best Picture, Troy Kotsur won Best Supporting Actor, and the cast shared the Screen Actors Guild ensemble award. In 2023 she moved behind the camera, directing Ava’s Story, an episode of Fox’s Accused about a deaf surrogate, with deaf actors in the leading roles.

Her own life became a subject in 2025. Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, directed by the deaf actress Shoshannah Stern and built around a conversation between the two women in American Sign Language, premiered at Sundance in January, reached cinemas through Kino Lorber in June and aired on PBS’s American Masters in October. In 2026 she returned as a producer: SIREN: The Voices of Shelley Beattie, Irene Taylor’s documentary about the deaf bodybuilder who competed on American Gladiators as Siren and died in 2008, premiered on HBO on September 22. Matlin found Beattie’s story through an internet search and recognized in it the pattern of her own: fame, discrimination, addiction, a hearing world that kept asking a deaf woman to explain herself.

The advocacy runs alongside the acting. She has campaigned for closed captioning for decades, testified before the US Senate, joined the board of trustees of Gallaudet University and became the ACLU’s celebrity ambassador for disability rights; at the 2026 Oscars the Academy’s president singled her out from the stage for the captioning technology her campaigning helped bring into cinemas. Matlin has been married since 1993 to Kevin Grandalski, a Burbank police officer she met while filming Reasonable Doubts; they have four children. In June 2026 she gave the commencement address at the University of Oregon, where her youngest daughter, Isabelle, was graduating.

That same month Matlin signed with Gilbertson Entertainment for management across film, television and producing, a deal that reads like a plan. The woman who once had to wait for others to write her a part now chooses which deaf stories reach the screen and who gets to tell them. Forty years after her debut, that is the role the Oscar never offered her.