The first time Libby Matlin went to see ”Children of a Lesser God,” she almost got sick. Sitting in the Old Orchard Theatre in Skokie waiting for the movie to start made her stomach hurt because she was so nervous. Then suddenly, there on the screen, actress Marlee Matlin appeared. Libby Matlin leaped to her feet.
”That`s my daughter!” she yelled.
”Mazel tov!” a couple sitting nearby shouted.
Good luck, indeed. Libby Matlin survived her initial bout of queasiness and has gone back to see ”Children of a Lesser God” seven times. Her daughter, a deaf actress who was born and reared in Chicago`s northwest suburbs, went on to win an Academy Award for her performance in the film.
When she accepted the Oscar for Best Actress a couple of weeks ago, Marlee Matlin, 21, held up the statue in one hand and with the other flashed sign language that said, ”I want to thank my parents.” In the balcony her parents wept.
There was a certain vindication in the award for Elizabeth and Donald Matlin. A high fever that accompanied a case of German measles stole virtually all of their daughter`s hearing when she was 18 months old. She is now totally deaf in her right ear and supplements the 20 percent hearing ability in her left ear with a hearing aid.
Nevertheless, when she was old enough, the Matlins sent their daughter to public schools.
”She had been accepted at a school for deaf children in St. Louis,”
Donald Matlin says. ”We went down there. It was in the winter. We went out on the playground, and there were all these kids playing, but you couldn`t hear a sound. I said to myself, `How am I going to send my daughter here? She`s going to have to learn to talk.` This is a hearing world.”
Finding a school wasn`t easy. ”She went to a different school each of her first six years,” her father recalls, ”because back then they weren`t equipped to work with hearing-handicapped people. Usually, we wouldn`t know where she was going to school until the last week before school started.”
As the little girl was being shuttled from school to school, her parents
”tried to keep her a natural little girl and bring her up just like we did her older brothers,” her father says.
It wasn`t always easy.
”When she was very little, she used to wear a hearing aid in each ear,” her father says. ”People used to come up to her in stores and ask what the score was in the ball game. They just didn`t understand.”
Marlee Matlin learned sign language and lip reading and eventually graduated from Hersey High School in Arlington Heights. She went on to Harper Junior College in Palatine, and it was there that she heard about auditions for ”Children of a Lesser God,” the story of a hearing-impaired girl who falls in love with her teacher.
The actress had been introduced to the theater when she was 8. ”We sent her to a class at the Center for Deafness in Des Plaines,” her father says.
”A group of deaf children would get together and learn to draw or to act. She wanted to go.”
The center staged several amateur theater productions each year, and Marlee Matlin got the lead in most of them. She appeared in musicals, where, wrote one theater critic, she signed ”in rhythm with the beat of the musical score.”
The Center for Deafness was important for Marlee Matlin. She made friends in a way she hadn`t in public school. Consequently, she developed a sense of loyalty to the place that lingers.
”If Marlee hadn`t been doing all this (acting and winning awards), she`d be teaching at the center,” her father says.
Besides a flair for performance, the young woman also developed a temper not unlike the one she displayed in her award-winning movie role. ”When she lived at home, she broke at least three door jambs by slamming the door too hard,” her mother recalls.
”She was very independent,” her father adds. ”All her life she wanted to be a police lady. She even applied to be an interpreter for the Northbrook police when we moved here, but they never responded. I tell you, she has a lot of nerve. One summer when she was in school she got a job working in the lingerie department of a store at Randhurst Mall.”
By then she had learned to talk in a sort of guttural monotone and faked her way through sales. She still orders in restaurants, sometimes for her friends, and would have spoken the name of the winner when she presented the Oscar for best achievement in sound at the Academy Awards but for a last-second case of nerves, her mother says.
”But she can talk,” Libby Matlin adds. ”Boy, can she talk.”
In fact, a phone call to the Matlin home in the northwest suburbs brings a please-leave-a-message recording by the actress herself.
Nevertheless, her most fluid form of communication remains sign language. To sign, her mother learned early on, takes a special talent.
”When a hearing person signs, to a hearing-impaired person it`s like someone talking in broken English,” Libby Matlin says.
Although they say they find themselves beset by sycophants, Donald and Libby Matlin have enjoyed their daughter`s recent celebrity, as well as her romance with actor William Hurt, who played her teacher in ”Children of a Lesser God.”
”Last December Marlee decided to cook Bill Christmas dinner,” her mother says. ”So she called to ask for instructions about how to cook a brisket.”
Communicating via a telephone typewriter designed for deaf people, Libby Matlin provided her daughter with instructions.
”The day after that I was at work,” says her mother, who sells jewelry. ”I got a phone call. It was Bill. He wanted to know how to slice the brisket. Here was a famous movie star asking me how to slice a brisket.”
The Matlins` relationship with Hurt, who is 16 years older than their daughter, has been amiable.
”Bill is superintelligent and a supergreat guy. He can`t stand the Hollywood scene and won`t go near it,” Libby Matlin says. ”Marlee is very fortunate being protected by Bill. He loves her very much.”
The two probably never would have met had it not been for Marlee Matlin`s hearing impairment, nor, in all likelihood, would the young Chicagoan have won her Oscar. And in a certain way that would have suited Libby Matlin just fine. ”I`m glad Marlee is happy,” says her mother. ”But if I had my druthers, I`d rather she hear than be awarded all the Oscars in the world. And the truth of the matter is if someone asked Marlee on the q.t. if she would rather hear than have all this happening, I guarantee you she`d say she`d rather hear.
