“A Conversation with Marlee Matlin: From Oscar to West Wing and Beyond,” September 14

Wednesday, September 14, 7 p.m.

Presented by the Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline Public Libraries

A revered performer who, 35 years later, remains the youngest-ever winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress, film and television icon Marlee Matlin joins Illinois Libraries Present to share the highs and lows of her Hollywood career and journeys as an activist in A Conversation with Marlee Matlin: From Oscar to West Wing and Beyond, a virtual Deaf Awareness Month program presented mere months after her film CODA swept every category it was nominated in at the 2022 Oscars.

Matlin was born in Morton Grove, Illinois, in 1965, and lost all hearing in her right ear and 80 percent of the hearing in her left ear at the age of 18 months due to illness and fevers. In her 2009 autobiography I'll Scream Later, Matlin suggests that her hearing loss may have been due to a genetically malformed cochlea. She is the only member of her family who is deaf and enjoys a sense of humor about her deafness, stating, "Often I'm talking to people through my speakerphone, and after 10 minutes or so they say, 'Wait a minute, Marlee, how can you hear me?' They forget I have an interpreter there who is signing to me as they talk. So I say, 'You know what? I can hear on Wednesdays.'"

Matlin made her stage debut at the age of seven as Dorothy in an International Center on Deafness and the Arts (ICODA) children's-theatre production of The Wizard of Oz, and continued to appear with the ICODA group throughout her childhood. At age 13, she won second prize in the Chicago Center's Annual International Creative Arts Festival for an essay titled "If I Was Not a Movie Star," and years later, she was discovered by Henry Winkler during one of her ICODA performances, which ultimately led to her film debut in 1986's Children of a Lesser God. Writing in Time magazine, Richard Schickel said that Matlin "has an unusual talent for concentrating her emotions -- and an audience's -- in her signing. But there is something more here, an ironic intelligence, a fierce but not distancing wit, that the movies, with their famous ability to photograph thought, discover in very few performances." Children of a Lesser God earned her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama and an Academy Award for Best Actress – only 21 years old at the time, Matlin remains the youngest actress to receive the Oscar in the Best Actress category. She was the only Deaf nominee and recipient in any category until 2022, when Troy Kotsur won for Best Supporting Actor for his role opposite Matlin in CODA.

Following her success with Children of a Lesser God, Matlin starred in the police drama series Reasonable Doubts from 1991 to 1993, which earned her two Golden Globe Award nominations, and her guest roles in Seinfeld (1993), Picket Fences (1993), The Practice (2000), and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2004–05) earned her four Primetime Emmy Award nominations. For her role in CODA, she was among those who received the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, and other significant films and TV credits include What the Bleep Do We Know?, Glee, CSI: NY, and, for seven seasons, a recurring guest role as Joey Lucas on The West Wing. Matlin is also a prominent member of the National Association of the Deaf, actively involved with charitable organizations such as Easter Seals and the Children Affected by AIDS Foundation, and in 2009, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Co-presented by the Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline Public Libraries, A Conversation with Marlee Matlin: From Oscar to West Wing and Beyond will be offered in ASL and translated through an interpreter, with the hour-long September 14 event taking place at 7 p.m. Participation is free, and the presentation can be accessed by visiting RockIslandLibrary.org, MolineLibrary.com, and EastMolineLibrary.com.