From
The NY Times:
Audree
Norton, a deaf actress whose fight to be cast on a television show in
the late 1970s effectively ended her career in the medium but greatly
helped the careers of deaf actors who followed her, died on April 22 at
her home in Fremont, Calif. She was 88.
Her
death was announced by her alma mater, Gallaudet University, in
Washington. At her death, Ms. Norton was an emeritus professor at Ohlone
College in Fremont, where she taught English, psychology and drama.
Ms. Norton was a founding member, in 1967, of the
National Theater of the Deaf.
The company’s formation was a watershed moment in the employment of
deaf actors, who had enjoyed steady work in the silent-film era but had
been marginalized with the coming of talkies.
The
National Theater of the Deaf was the first company to present regular
productions in American Sign Language. Today used by hundreds of
thousands of deaf people in the United States and parts of Canada,
A.S.L. arose spontaneously among deaf Americans in the early 19th
century. But by the 1960s, it had long been stigmatized as a crude
pidgin English. At the time, its myriad grammatical complexities — as
rich as, though quite different from, those of English — were only dimly
understood.
Ms.
Norton acted in many of the company’s productions, including two
evenings of one-acts that came to Broadway in 1969. The first included
an adaptation of “
The Tale of Kasane,”
a Japanese work, in which she played one of a pair of lovers on whom
the action centers; the second included signed renditions of poems by
William Blake, Lewis Carroll and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with Ms.
Norton signing Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?”
In both productions, narrators translated the action into spoken English for the benefit of hearing audience members.
Ms.
Norton, often described as the first deaf actor to be cast on a network
television show, had guest roles on several staples of the 1960s and
’70s. Among them were “Mannix,” on which she played a deaf woman who
reads the lips of a man in the act of plotting a kidnapping; the
long-running sitcom “Family Affair”; and “The Streets of San Francisco.”
In
the late 1970s, she and her husband, Kenneth Norton, who is also deaf,
auditioned for the roles of the mother and father in “Mom and Dad Can’t
Hear Me,” an ABC Afterschool Special about a hearing teenager (played by
Rosanna Arquette) with deaf parents.
As
Ms. Norton recounted in “Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film
Entertainment Industry” (1988), by John S. Schuchman, the show’s casting
director told her, “Of all the people, you and your husband won the
roles,” but added, “But you are out because the director is afraid to
use deaf actors and actresses.”
The
show was broadcast in 1978, with the parents played by two hearing
actors, Priscilla Pointer and Stephen Elliott. The Nortons responded
with a public battle, filing a complaint with the Screen Actors Guild
and rallying other deaf actors to the cause.
The
protest was of no direct help to Ms. Norton, who — possibly as a
consequence — did not work in television again. But by raising public
awareness of the work of deaf actors, it demonstrably helped pave the
way for the generation that followed, including Marlee Matlin, who won
an Oscar in 1986 for “Children of a Lesser God.”
In
1989 The Los Angeles Times reported that before the fight over “Mom and
Dad Can’t Hear Me,” only 33 percent of deaf characters on TV were
played by deaf actors, compared with 78 percent a decade later.
Audree
Lauraine Bennett was born on Jan. 13, 1927, in Great Falls, Mont. When
she was 2, a bout of spinal meningitis left her deaf. With her mother,
she moved to Minnesota, where she attended what is now the Minnesota
State Academy for the Deaf in Faribault.
She
earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Gallaudet College, as it was
then known, in 1952, and married Mr. Norton, a classmate, that year.
She received a master’s in rhetoric and public address from California
State University, Hayward, in 1976.
Ms.
Norton began her acting career at mid-century as an on-camera model,
appearing in TV commercials for Kodak and Royal Crown Cola, accompanied
by a hearing actor’s voice-over.
Besides
her husband, Ms. Norton’s survivors include a daughter, Nikki; a son,
Kurt; two grandchildren; and a great-grandchild. Another son, Dane, died
in 1990.
She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Gallaudet in 2012.
