‘Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore' is Bay Area filmmaker's love letter to a groundbreaking actress

San Francisco Chronicle​

7 days ago

Marlee Matlin, the only deaf actress to win an Academy Award and still the youngest to win best actress, has a small tattoo on each wrist. One spells out 'perseverance,' the other 'warrior.'
'I'm still hustling after 37 years,' she signs with a mixture of pride and resignation as she sits in a makeup chair in the new documentary ' Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore.'
The film, directed by Fremont-raised Shoshannah Stern, also a deaf actress, is extraordinary not so much in its content — most of the salacious stuff, such as her abusive relationship with actor William Hurt, had been revealed in Matlin's 2009 memoir — but in its form. Through some impressive technical planning and execution, Stern and her team make each scene understandable to both deaf and hearing people through split screens and subtitles, and yet it's not cumbersome. The documentary is, in fact, fast moving and absorbing.
Matlin, of course, was an unknown Chicago stage actress, still in her teens, when she was cast opposite Hurt in the 1986 film version of Mark Medoff's Broadway play 'Children of a Lesser God,' about the difficult romance between a deaf janitor and a hearing speech teacher. The film ignited debate, was a box office hit and nominated for several Oscars, with Matlin winning best actress over Jane Fonda, Sigourney Weaver, Sissy Spacek and Kathleen Turner.
Overnight, she became the most visible deaf person on the planet, and with that came sudden responsibility to, as we say today, represent. She became actively involved in a movement to appoint a deaf president to lead Gallaudet University, a hearing impaired institution (an event profiled in the recent Apple TV+ documentary 'Deaf President Now!'). Matlin also led efforts to enact federal legislation mandating closed captioning on all televisions, significantly advancing accessibility for the deaf community.
Matlin's motivation for the latter stemmed from her favorite movie as a young girl, the movie she credits for making her want to be an actress: 'The Wizard of Oz.' She watched the 1939 classic whenever it was on TV, and one can only imagine how, to a child who could not hear, what a bizarre dreamscape it is, like a children's film made by Fellini.
The biggest celebrities who sit for Stern's camera are writer-producer Aaron Sorkin, who created a recurring role for her on his White House drama 'The West Wing,' and actor Henry Winkler, her best friend in Hollywood.
How Matlin and Winkler met is truly a delightful story, and it happened when she was a teenager, way before she went to Hollywood. The cast of 'Happy Days' was to play in a celebrity softball game before a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. Matlin loved the Fonz, Winkler's signature character on the show, because he fell for a deaf woman (played by Linda Bove, a deaf actress who was a regular on 'Sesame Street') in a memorable episode.
She wrote a fan letter to Winkler and invited him to a performance by her deaf children's theater troupe, and he brought the 'Happy Days' cast with him. After the messy break-up with Hurt, Winkler and his wife Stacey provided a safe haven.
There are painful moments in 'Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore,' and there are triumphs. But mostly, it is a film of grace and acceptance — a necessary portrait of a groundbreaking artist.