HOLLYWOOD / LOS ANGELES -- Audree Lauraine Norton, who many consider the first Deaf actress to appear in a featured role on an American network TV series, has died. She was 88.
Audree Norton, a founding member of The National Theatre of the Deaf, died April 22 in Fremont, California, her family announced.
In September 1968, on “The Silent Cry,” the episode that kicked off the second season of the CBS crime drama Mannix, Norton starred as a Deaf woman who, while reading the lips of a man talking inside a phone booth, realizes that he’s plotting to kidnap someone.
She seeks out good-guy private detective Joe Mannix (Mike Connors). He investigates, putting their lives in jeopardy.
Norton would later appear on such series as Family Affair and The Streets of San Francisco.
Norton also played a Deaf mother who wanted to adopt a child in a 1971 episode of ABC’s The Man and the City, and she and her husband, Kenneth, who also was Deaf, auditioned for roles as parents in a 1978 ABC Afterschool Special titled “Mom and Dad Can’t Hear Me.”
According to the 1988 book Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and he Film Entertainment Industry, written by John S. Schuchman, a casting director told Norton that “of all the people, you and your husband won the roles. But you are out because the director is afraid to use Deaf actors and actresses.”
Instead, Priscilla Pointer and Stephen Elliott were cast, and Norton filed a complaint with the Screen Actors Guild. Schuchman suggests that Norton’s grievance cost her a career in television but paved the way for other Deaf actors to work... Read The Full Story.
