Latest news with #lipreading
New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Deaf Actress Has a Message She Wants You to Hear
When Rose Ayling-Ellis is lip reading, she's guessing most of the time. 'You can get the shape of a mouth,' she said recently, but to understand what someone is saying, context is everything. 'You have to pick up body language, the mood, the vibe,' she said. Ayling-Ellis, 30, said that learning to lip read had been 'a survival technique.' The actress, who was born deaf, speaks and also uses British Sign Language, and was aided in an interview by an interpreter. In the TV crime thriller 'Code of Silence,' which arrives on Britbox on July 24, Ayling-Ellis plays a deaf woman who is recruited by the police to eavesdrop discreetly. In the show, as in life, she said, lip reading is 'like a puzzle.' When Ayling Ellis's character, Alison, watches CCTV footage of suspected gang members, she scrutinizes their facial expressions and observes how they stand. Like any good detective, Alison must study the scene, piecing together clues. In a clever visual conceit, jumbled subtitles appear onscreen and gradually unscramble as she decodes each sentence. 'Code of Silence' first screened on ITV in Britain in May, and its debut episode drew over six million viewers, according to the broadcaster. Ayling-Ellis was already known to many from 'Strictly Come Dancing,' the wildly popular BBC show that inspired the 'Dancing With the Stars' franchise. She won the show in 2021 with a routine, to Clean Bandit and Zara Larsson's 'Symphony,' that fell silent halfway to mirror her experience of being deaf. That victory made her a household name and landed her TV presenting gigs, including as a sportscaster at the 2024 Paralympic Games. But after being 'on the TV as myself quite a few times,' she said, she wanted to get back to acting. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Daily Mail
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Don't put our Rose in danger, she's a national treasure in the making: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV
Code Of Silence ITV1 Tolerant and slow to anger though we are, the British public can never excuse some evils. Cruelty to puppies is one. Sneering at the late Queen is another. But most reprehensible of all, a crime beyond forgiveness, is being horrid to Rose Ayling-Ellis. Craig Revel Horwood found this out to his cost on Strictly Come Dancing in 2021, when he was the only judge not to award Rose the full ten points for her semi-final waltz with Giovanni Pernice. Craig gave her a measly nine, and was roundly castigated from all quarters. Actor Andrew Buchan is likely to find himself shunned in the street for his performance as crabby DI James Marsh, in Code Of Silence. We can tell he's a martinet and a bully from the moment he gives her a condescending smile, before telling colleagues she isn't up to the job. How dare he?! Our lovely Rose, so diffident and naive, yet dauntlessly brave? He ought to consider himself jolly lucky to have her on the team. The job in question is lip-reading for a police surveillance unit, stalking a gang of robbers suspected of planning a heist on a jewel vault. Rose plays dinner lady Alison, plucked from the police canteen to watch covert video footage and decode what the robbers are saying. Writer Catherine Moulton shows, without labouring the point, how police and catering bosses alike imagine Alison must be a bit thick, because she's deaf. They talk down to her and begin with the assumption that she'll struggle with whatever they ask of her, whether that's serving an oat milk latte or identifying the target of a multi-million-pound robbery. Even the officer who first spots her potential, DS Francis (Charlotte Ritchie), treats her as an appealing but innocent child. Alison is never bitter, but the frustration sometimes shows through. 'I don't want to be hearing,' she complains to her mother (Fifi Garfield), 'I just want other people to be a bit deaf.' It's easy to believe that, fed up of being underestimated, Alison will take reckless risks to prove herself useful. These include getting a job as a barmaid at a pub owned by the chief villain (Joe Absolom), and chatting up the gang's computer hacker, Liam (Kieron Moore). This is no hardship, since Liam clearly fancies the socks off her, and can't believe his luck that she'll even talk to him — especially after he knocks her off her bike. What he doesn't know, of course, is that she was trying to tail his car at the time. Charming and a bit goofy though he is, Liam is part of a vicious gang. The moment last night at the end of the second episode, when he and his boss caught Alison spying on them over the pub's CCTV, was genuinely alarming. She's our Rose, a national treasure in the making. We don't want to see her in any worse jeopardy than a dodgy cha-cha-cha.
