Emens Auditorium audience members welcomed acclaimed actress Marlee Matlin Monday night by cheering, clapping and extending both arms upward and waving their hands - the sign demonstrating applause among the hearing-impaired.
The audience, which filled most of Emens' lower level, responded enthusiastically to Matlin's 35-minute talk about her life, career and deafness.
Appearing as part of the Ball State American Sign Language Club's Deaf Awareness Week, Matlin, though sixth months pregnant with her third child, was lively and animated.
Matlin signed while she was onstage, and interpreter/production assistant Jack Jason verbally translated her talk over the public address system.
Early on she described her experience of winning an Academy Award for her performance in "Children of a Lesser God."
"It was overwhelming, to say the least," she said. "I couldn't believe how it felt."
Matlin recounted the awkwardness of accepting the award with wit. Because much of the Academy Award audience appeared to be in tears, she joked the experience was not unlike being "at your own funeral."
She also described the ensuing photo session and dealing with dozens of photographers unsuccessfully yelling for her to look toward their cameras. It was not until friend Whoopi Goldberg notified them of her situation that the photographers devised a way to get her attention - by wiggling their fingers in front of her.
They weren't making any coherent sense in sign language, Matlin said, but to meet their own needs, they had adapted to her deafness.
The following year, at the Academy Awards, Matlin sparked a controversy among the hearing-impaired community when she presented the award for Best Actor with her voice. Some people thought she was denying her deafness or conforming to "the norm."
Matlin, however, simply wanted to show her versatility by proving she could both sign and speak.
"I must have spoken clearly enough, because the right person, Michael Douglas, came up to get the award," she joked.
Her parents were a crucial part of her success, she said, by not denying her any of the opportunities hearing children received. They made the decision to enroll her in her neighborhood school in Morton Grove, Ill., instead of sending her to an all-deaf institution far from home, where she wouldn't be near her family.
One summer, at a camp with hearing children, Matlin was asked to sing. Instead of being ashamed of her voice, she belted out the tune with great enthusiasm, and, seeing her audience was smiling and laughing, got more and more into the act as they showed their appreciation. At that moment she knew she wanted to be a performer.
"That's when the acting bug bit me," she said.
Later, when she was in a children's theater company in Chicago, she had the opportunity to meet actor/director Henry Winkler, famous for his role as "The Fonz" in television's "Happy Days."
She began to tell Winkler, who had struggled with dyslexia as a youth, of her dreams to make it big in Hollywood when Winkler was pulled aside by a family member and advised not to encourage the "little deaf girl" to have such far-fetched goals.
Winkler ignored the advice and knelt to speak with her. He told her she could achieve anything her heart desired, something remembered nine years later when she won her Oscar for the "Children" role.
She and Winkler had kept in touch over the years, and after winning the award she appeared on his doorstep and proudly displayed the gold figurine in lieu of a verbal greeting.
Matlin, in spite of critics' claims that she was a flash-in-the-pan sensation, went on to a successful career including both film and television, also becoming involved with charitable causes like VSAarts, the Starlight Foundation, Victory over Violence and the TRIPOD school.
Audience members Susie Turgeon and Tracy Holtzlaiter were impressed with Matlin's onstage energy.
"I like the way she signed but still put emotion in what she was saying," Turgeon said.
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