She Was Twelve and Deaf When She Asked the Fonz Whether She Could Be an Actress in Hollywood.

The Marlee Matlin Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"He rescued me from that. From not believing in myself."

- Marlee Matlin, on Henry Winkler

She Performed for Him Like He Was the Only Person in the Room. Then She Asked Him One Question.

The Center on Deafness was a children's theater in Chicago where deaf and hearing kids performed together, siblings voicing lines for the deaf actors. Someone there heard the cast of Happy Days was in town and sent an invitation more or less as a joke. Henry Winkler had the day off. He came.

Marlee was twelve, and she had been a fan for years - Happy Days had a deaf character, played by Linda Bove, so the show already felt like it had room for her. She performed straight at him, signing "Free to Be You and Me," as though the rest of the audience weren't there. Afterward she walked up and asked whether she could be an actor in Hollywood, just like him.

Her mother interrupted before he could answer. Being deaf, Marlee didn't hear what was said, and didn't learn it for years. Her mother took Winkler aside and asked him to dampen his enthusiasm - to tell her daughter to go to college, get an education, dream other dreams. She read the magazines. She knew what Hollywood did to people, and she had a particular fear about what it would do to a girl who was deaf.

When David asked how it felt to finally hear that story, her answer went somewhere unexpected: it broke her heart - for her mother. She understands where a mother comes from. She is careful to say it wasn't that her mother didn't believe in her. And then, in the same breath, the other half of it: he rescued her from not believing in herself.

For years before she moved to Los Angeles, they were pen pals. She says she wrote mostly to confirm that the friendship had been real - that she actually had a friend in Hollywood. Every time she wrote, he wrote back. That was the test, and he passed it repeatedly. "Every time I got his letter in the mail, he validated who I was. And every child needs to have that feeling."

▶ Watch on YouTube: The night she met Henry Winkler - ~2:00

She Won the Oscar and Nobody Got Up. She Found That Out on This Show, Thirty-Nine Years Later.

She was nineteen when she got Sarah Norman in Children of a Lesser God, after a four-year search that had auditioned well-known deaf actors. Nobody knew who Marlee Matlin was. She learned about her Best Actress nomination from inside the Betty Ford Center, where she had checked in the day after winning the Golden Globe - a counselor named Jane woke her before dawn, walked her to a teletypewriter, and then told her to go clean her room. Paramount had no idea where she was. She was let out for two hours, wristband cut off, to sit for a magazine cover shoot, and then went back.

She won at the 1987 ceremony - the first deaf performer to win an Academy Award, and still the youngest woman ever to win Best Actress. David told her he'd watched the tape and noticed that not one person in the room stood up. She had never registered it. The whole night, she says, was a blur.

The year that followed taught her how hard the work was to get. Winkler had warned her plainly: nobody hands you a silver spoon. So when she returned to present Best Actor the following year, she signed the opening and then spoke the nominees' names out loud. The calculation was hers alone - not her agent's, not Jack's, nobody's. Producers and writers around the world were watching, most of them unaware she could speak. She was selling herself.

It detonated. She was told she had sent a message to parents of deaf children that the right way to raise them is speech, not sign. A deaf publication ran the headline "Offensive?" She had grown up in Chicago with no deaf culture classes and no grounding in the history she had just walked into - which she offers as a fact, not an excuse. What wounded her was not the anger. It was that nobody asked. Not one of the actors she had looked up to took her by the hand, with a single exception: Bernard Bragg, a co-founder of the National Theatre of the Deaf. She shut the community out for fifteen years.

She still doesn't regret it - only that she was never given the chance to explain, or to hear them explain. She says she carries something like PTSD from it. Today she wants to work with the deaf community rather than stand in front of it, and says the respect is there now.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Oscar night, and the year everything blew up - ~10:17

They Bragged About Her to Anyone Who Would Listen. That Was Never What She Wanted.

She grew up in Morton Grove, Illinois, the only deaf member of her family, deaf since eighteen months. Her father sold cars; her brothers Eric and Mark were years older and mostly out of the house.

What never got resolved was her parents' guilt about her deafness. She told them repeatedly it was all right - look at me, I'm fine - and it didn't land. She still doesn't know how she became deaf; one brother says a high fever on a flight, her mother vehemently denied it, and the accounts never reconciled. She says she never once told them she wished she weren't deaf. She only ever wished for two things: to talk on the phone like everybody else, and to hear all music.

Asked what she meant by saying her parents left her alone to solve things on her own, she listed what they didn't know about - her drug use, domestic violence, sexual abuse by a teacher, her language deprivation - and then stopped herself to make one thing explicit: that didn't make them bad parents. They gave her the best they could and all the love they could. They had hard childhoods of their own.

Her mother lived to see her win. David asked whether she ever said she'd gotten it wrong, that she hadn't realised this was possible. The answer was no. That conversation never happened, and then came Alzheimer's, and then it couldn't. Her father, asked anything about his childhood or hers, would burst into tears and change nothing; he took it all with him. Her advice to anyone listening is to not wait - have the conversation, get your house in order.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Her parents, and the conversation they never had - ~27:00

Everyone Else Spent Lockdown Googling How to Bake Bread. She Typed In "Deaf Women" and Found a Life Nobody Had Told.

It was late in the pandemic, everyone in the house asleep. Instead of looking up bread recipes or hunting for yeast like the rest of the country, Marlee typed two words into a search bar: deaf women. A name came back she did not recognise. Shelley Beattie - deaf, a champion bodybuilder, and one of the original American Gladiators, competing as Siren.

She is disarmingly honest about the fact that she should have known. She doesn't subscribe to the idea that every deaf person knows every other deaf person - but an American Gladiator, she says, she should have had on her radar, and the reason she didn't is that she was busy, selfishly, with whatever was happening in her own career. She read for a few minutes and was gone. She messaged Jack Jason around eleven at night to say she wanted to make a film about this woman. He asked whether it could wait until tomorrow. It could not.

The result is Siren: The Voices of Shelley Beattie, an HBO documentary Marlee produced - following Feeling Through, the short film she produced that earned an Academy Award nomination. She describes Beattie's story as deeply human and deeply complicated, with enormous highs and lows, and says she trusted her instinct the moment the name came up on the screen.

David had watched it the night before the interview and asked about something the film deliberately withholds: it never tells you how or why Beattie died. Marlee confirmed that she took her own life, and that the circumstances were complicated by the life she had lived. The omission was a choice, and she explained it simply.

▶ Watch on YouTube: How she found Shelley Beattie - ~41:00

She Showed Up at His House Holding the Oscar. "I've Got This, But I Don't Have a Boyfriend and I Don't Have a Place to Live."

After the win, the criticism and the end of her relationship with William Hurt, she was lost - no idea what the next step was. The letters had told her he was encouraging. But letters were letters, so she decided to turn up in person and find out what he'd do face to face.

He looked at her and said come in, let's have something to eat. There is always an absurd amount of food at the Winkler house. He and his wife Stacey suggested she stay the weekend and they'd talk it over. She stayed two years, until Stacey Winkler started telling her to clean her room. In 1993 she got married at their house.

What she got from him was never uncritical. When a first assistant director refused to push a West Wing call time by one hour so she could take her son to his first day of kindergarten, she phoned Winkler expecting backup. He told her flatly that she was wrong: actors make sacrifices, and there would be many, many more. She is, by her own admission, still a little mad about it - and she also now thinks he was right. Another time a director shot down an idea she'd had for a scene, a deaf perspective she thought was perfect for it, with no explanation. She called him, offended. He asked exactly what happened, then delivered six words and ended the conversation: she's the director, not you.

The tough love hasn't stopped, and neither has the rest of it - he texts her out of the blue, for no reason, to say he loves her. The ledger has also evened out in small comic ways. She set him up on Instagram. She got him booked to read the nativity story at Disney's Candlelight Processional, watched his first performance, and went backstage afterward to give him two notes, actor to actor: slow down a notch, and it's frankincense and myrrh, not mirth.

She is sober nearly forty years, one day at a time, texting a group of women every single day. She sits as a governor of the Academy's actors branch, in her second term, voting on the awards that once had nothing for a deaf performer. Asked whether she still has something to prove, she said no - not prove. She just has a great deal left to make, and no interest whatsoever in stopping.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The Oscar, the doorstep, and two years in the guest room - ~46:00

"I'm Marlee Matlin, and the person who believed in me was Henry Winkler."