By SP

Earlier this summer, Showtime announced that “Oscar®-winner Marlee Matlin will become a regular on Showtime’s successful long-running series The L Word. She will portray a fiery artist who catches the attention of Jennifer Beals’ character Bette Porter.”

Actually, in the earlier announcement that came out in April, it was mentioned that Matlin was joining the fourth season for 11 episodes. Now, as a regular, she might stay for the next season if the show continues.

As mentioned in a July 2006 article in Daily News, “Marlee Matlin admits she's been feeling ‘nervous, anxious — like the new kid in school’ … ‘that's the part I love about acting, when people have asked me to do things I've never done that are different and challenging’ … ‘certainly the scripts I've been reading are not like any I've done’.”

An interesting fact that was mentioned in the same article is that Matlin hasn’t even seen any of the episodes of The L Word. Jimmy Smits and Richard Schiff, cast members from the West Wing where Matlin had a recurring role (2000-2006) were very supportive of her appearance in the lesbian drama and even gave her the DVDs of the previous seasons. As Matlin said to the Daily News, “I got hooked.”

The announcement that Marlee Matlin was joining The L Word was met with a lot of excitement among the fans of the show, considering Matlin’s credentials as an actress and as a public figure.  

Marlee Matlin’s official website (marleematlinsite.com) reminds us that she “received worldwide critical acclaim for her motion picture debut in Paramount Pictures’ Children of a Lesser God (1986), a performance the film community chose to recognize in with its highest honor – the Academy Award for Best Actress. At age 21, she became the youngest recipient of the Best Actress Oscar and one of only four actresses to receive that honor for a film debut. In addition to the Oscar, Marlee was honored by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama.”

A lot has been written about Matlin on biographical websites, including IMDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and her official website. Marlee Matlin was born in Morton Grove, Illinois on August 24, 1965 and began acting at the age of seven. As she said in her Celebrity Café interview  (2004) about her love for acting, “It must have been born in me. I've been doing it since I was 7 years old. Maybe it was my family (we’re very dramatic... no... we're Jews... oh well... we’re both! Ha!). Maybe it was because I was the youngest and only girl in a family of two older brothers. Maybe my way of communicating through sign made me more in tune with my body and how it moved. Who knows? I just know when I saw a stage for the first time, I wanted to be on it.”

As stated on IMdB website, Matlin “was rendered deaf at the age of 18 months through a bout with Roseola Infantum” but it never let her to hold back on things that she wanted to do in life. As Matlin said, “I have always resisted putting limitations on myself, both professionally and personally” (IMdB).

But, that resistance to her disability helped her to continue with her passion for acting after she graduated from the Harper College in Palatine, Illinois where Matlin studied Criminal Justice.

In an interview with Business Week (by John Williams May 23, 2001), the actress said that she learned to speak before she turned 5 years old.  She explained that “when I learned to sign and speak at the same time, the whole world opened up to me. That's the beauty of encouraging kids who are deaf to use whatever it takes to communicate … At work, I take advantage of the sign-language interpreters that the studio/production company provides.”

As mentioned in the same interview, now, as an adult, “in her dressing room, Matlin has a Telecommunications Device for the Deaf, or TDD, and a television with closed-caption technology. At home, she has a series of signaling devices to alert her when the doorbell rings, the phone rings, or when her new baby cries.”

“After several years of performing on stage throughout Chicago and the Midwest, Marlee was discovered in a Chicago stage production of Mark Medoff’s Tony Award-winning play, Children of a Lesser God.”  Her official site biography recounts.  “Following an extensive international search for the lead role, the producers of the film version selected her to star opposite William Hurt.”

After that phenomenal Oscar-winning performance, Matlin appeared in numerous films and TV shows, including Walker (1987), The Man in Golden Mask (1990), The Linguini Incident (1991) and Robert Altman’s The Player (1992). Her first television role was on the NBC’ series “Reasonable Doubts” (1991), for which she “was twice nominated for both a Golden Globe Award as Best Actress in a Dramatic Television Series as well as the People's Choice Awards” (marleematlinsite.com). She was also nominated for two Emmy awards for her guest roles in “Seinfeld” (1993) and “Picket Fences” (1993-1996).

Matlin played her first non-deaf role in the Lifetime Television movie Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story (1994), and was nominated for a CableAce Award for Best Actress for that performance.  On her official site, she noted, “This role gave me the chance to do something I’d never done before. It was a new challenge for me and was a very rewarding experience.”

Since then, Matlin has appeared as a guest star or a recurring character in numerous shows, such as “Sweet Justice” (NBC), “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” (NBC), “Dead Silence” (HBO), “Spin City” (ABC), “Judging Amy” (CBS), “The Practice” (ABC), “Desperate Housewives” (ABC) and many others. For her role in “Law and Order”, Matlin received her fourth Emmy nomination.

In addition to acting, Marlee Matlin has also appeared in several educational and children programs and spent a lot of time traveling to different countries like Australia, Italy, Russia, Canada and others to visit hearing-impaired children and even to teach silent language. She also wrote a children’s book Deaf Child Crossing (2002) with two sequels, Nobody’s Perfect and Leading Ladies coming out in 2006 and 2007 (marleematlinsite.com, IMdB).

As a public figure, Matlin was behind the 1990 federal legislation that required “all televisions manufactured in the United States be equipped with closed captioning technology.” (marleematlinsite.com) She serves as board member of several charitable organizations, especially ones that benefit children. Matlin appeared as a celebrity spokesperson for the American Red Cross after the September 11 tragedy.

In her interview to Business Week, she discussed being a role model for hearing-impaired children and adults.  Her advice is simple: “Follow your dreams. Look to others for inspiration … I hope I inspire people who hear. Hearing people have the ability to remove barriers that prevent deaf people from achieving their dreams … But the most important thing is getting a thick skin. Talent is a major part of it all, but when others are judging your talent, you have to be prepared for both success and failure. And you have to want it. No actor I know is a success who hasn't wanted it with their entire heart and soul.”

As far as her personal life, her official website states that “Marlee makes her home in the greater Los Angeles area. She and her husband, law enforcement officer Kevin Grandalski welcomed their first child, Sarah, in 1996, their second child, Brandon, in 2000 and their third her third child, Tyler, in July, 2002. Marlee and her husband welcomed their fourth child, Isabelle in December, 2003.”

In her Daily News interview, Matlin said about all her acting and public appearance activities, including the filming of “The L Word”, “I've been so busy – the best thing is my kids and my husband, they’re the best support group … and ‘The L Word’ … has been so generous about letting me go back and forth to be with my family. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible.”
 
Still the question remains, how can Marlee Matlin juggle her career as a TV and movie star, public speaker, a writer and a mother of four children? She was asked this question by Dominick A. Miserandino in Celebrity Café interview and replied, “How? I don't know how. I just know I do it. But it takes work. I have a great husband, a great set of parents and in-laws, and obviously I have help with a nanny. It's not easy but there are others who do it every day and don't have a high profile job as I do. Patricia Heaton does it with four kids, Meryl Streep did it with four, Mare Winningham did it with five. It's just a matter of having the intention and seeing it through.”

Another question from the same interview addressed the idea of stereotypes in Hollywood when actors with disabilities were cast as the characters who would have the same physical problems and challenges. In Matlin’s career there were roles that were focused on her deafness and there were roles where her disability wasn’t even mentioned.

For example, the actress explained, “On West Wing it's a conscious choice. Aaron Sorkin never intended it to be a part of the show – my deafness that is. It was just part of who I was. Just like John Amos who was on the show happened to be black, etc... Aaron was intelligent enough to know that it was ability that mattered, not disability. Which is a word I’m not crazy about using.”

If her disability was an obstacle, Matlin never let it affect her life. In the same Celebrity Café interview she was asked if her life philosophy was “to work through the obstacles no matter what.”

Matlin replied, “Yes, but I also find the mantle of ‘she works hard for the money’ or ‘she’s overcome so many obstacles’ a bit overused. I know it allows me to stand out in a crowd when the sea of faces can seem so similar, and I know it serves a purpose in inspiring others who might be facing the same obstacles I faced while growing up, but at some point we have to stop and say ‘there's Marlee’ not ‘there's the deaf actress’.”

When the interviewer then called Matlin a “tough dame”, she replied, “I got a good handshake to prove it. A lot of executives tell me I have the best handshake in Hollywood.”