“I will continue to fight for what I think is necessary,” the Oscar-winning actress told PEOPLE in this week’s issue of Women Changing the World
For decades, Marlee Matlin has used her platform as an Oscar-winning actress to help the deaf and hard of hearing — and she doesn’t intend to stop anytime soon.
What drives her? “I like to type,” Matlin, 58, jokes to PEOPLE via his longtime translator Jack Jason.
She’s joking — sort of. “I still have a lot in me,” she says. “I will continue to fight for what I think is necessary for my community and beyond.”
That instinct kicked in as she watched Super Bowl LVIII on February 11 and felt a wave of disappointment. But her emotions had nothing to do with the final result.
Marlee Matlin on the fight for inclusion 34 years after winning the Oscar: ‘Deafness is not a costume’
Although Reba McEntire, Post Malone and Andra Day, who performed before the show at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, were accompanied by live American Sign Language performers on the field, CBS did not televise the ASL performers.
Matlin, who is deaf, vented to her nearly 400,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter) and tagged CBS.
“Absolutely SHOCKED @CBS for featuring Deaf performers at today’s pregame #SuperBowl and then don’t show a second (or more) of their performance… as has been the tradition for the past 30 years. WHY!?” she wrote.
“I was one of the millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing people who were excited when they heard the announcement: ‘The translator is here.’ They announced it on network television, our beautiful ASL language and our beautiful national anthem, and yet they didn’t show it,” Matlin says weeks later.
Recalling her post on social media, Matlin says, “It’s important to acknowledge the lack of accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing people at that time.”
Marlee Matin and her family.
Marlee Matlin/ Instagram
She says she never heard back from CBS. (The network did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.)
It’s just the last reminder that despite the work Code star has worked with organizations such as the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), the Starkey Hearing Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union for decades, there is plenty of room for improvement.
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Marlee Matlin.
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
“Even something as simple as watching TV as a family requires access,” says the mother of four, who along with NAD successfully lobbied Congress to require streaming services to enable closed captioning for all programming in 2014.
Marlee Matlin and other members of the Sundance Film Festival jury leave the premiere due to a subtitle malfunction
NAD’s goals include getting more ASL interpreters in senior living facilities, providing resources for parents of deaf babies, and improving the well-being of deaf youth.
Matlin jokes that it doesn’t take “rocket science” to make a difference, just more collaboration between deaf and hearing people. In that spirit, she will continue to “make noise for access,” as she puts it. “It’s just part of who I am.”
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Source: HIS Education