When Marlee Matlin won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the film “Children of a Lesser God” (1986), she was the then youngest recipient ever of the award and only one of four actresses to receive the Best Actress Oscar for her film debut. Those facts would be impressive enough on their own, but Matlin was not only an actress; she was also a deaf actress. It was not Matlin’s fault that the rest of her career was something of an anti-climax – when one reaches the top of the mountain in their first film role, there is nowhere to go but down. But since her brilliant debut, Matlin
