Deaf since she was 18 months old,[1] Matlin made her acting debut playing Sarah Norman in the romantic drama film Children of a Lesser God (1986), winning the Academy Award for Best Actress.

For her role in CODA (2021), she won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.

[13][14] Matlin attended a synagogue for the Deaf (Congregation Bene Shalom), and after studying Hebrew phonetically, was able to learn her Torah portion for her Bat Mitzvah.

[16] She graduated from John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights and attended Harper College in Palatine, Illinois.

[21] At the age of thirteen, she won second prize in the Chicago Center's Annual International Creative Arts Festival for an essay titled, "If I Was not a Movie Star."

She was discovered by Henry Winkler during one of her ICODA theater performances, which ultimately led to her film debut in Children of a Lesser God (1986).

[22] The film received generally positive reviews and Matlin's performance as Sarah Norman, a reluctant-to-speak deaf woman who falls for a hearing man, drew high praise: Richard Schickel of Time magazine wrote: "[Matlin] has an unusual talent for concentrating her emotions -- and an audience's -- in her signing.

"[23] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was also impressed with Matlin, writing, "She holds her own against the powerhouse she's acting with, carrying scenes with a passion and almost painful fear of being rejected and hurt, which is really what her rebellion is about,"[24] and Paul Attasanio of The Washington Post said, "The most obvious challenge of the role is to communicate without speaking, but Matlin rises to it in the same way the stars of the silent era did -- she acts with her eyes, her gestures.

Two years later, she made a guest appearance on Sesame Street with Billy Joel performing a revised version of "Just the Way You Are" with lyrics by Tony Geiss.

Matlin was nominated for a Golden Globe for her work as the lead female role in the television series Reasonable Doubts (1991–1993).

Matlin was nominated for an Emmy Award for a guest appearance in Picket Fences (1992) and became a regular on that series during its final season (1996).

Other television appearances include Seinfeld ("The Lip Reader"), The Outer Limits ("The Message"), ER, The Practice, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

She was nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards for her guest appearances in Seinfeld, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and The Practice.

That same year, Matlin was cast in season 4 of The L Word as Jodi Lerner, a lesbian sculptor and girlfriend of one of the show's protagonists, Bette Porter, played by Jennifer Beals.

In 2010, Matlin produced a pilot for a reality show she titled My Deaf Family, which she presented to various national network executives.

She has testified before the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources in support of the establishment of the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders.

[50] In the following year, Matlin was a finalist on the NBC show The Celebrity Apprentice, competing to win money for her charity, The Starkey Hearing Foundation,[51] finishing in second place.

[54] Matlin married Burbank police officer Kevin Grandalski on August 29, 1993, at the home of actor Henry Winkler.

[55] The couple first met while she was filming a scene from Reasonable Doubts outside the studio grounds; the police department had assigned Grandalski to provide security and control traffic.

She also tells about her rocky, two-year relationship with her significantly older Children of a Lesser God co-star William Hurt, who she says physically abused and raped her.

This includes starring in the police drama series Reasonable Doubts, Sesame Street and playing Mayor Laurie Bey in Picket Fences, pollster Joey Lucas in The West Wing, Ruby Whitlow in My Name Is Earl, Jodi Lerner in The L Word, and Melody Bledsoe in Switched at Birth.

In 1991, Matlin received the Bernard Bragg Young Artists Achievement Award at the Annual International Creative Arts Festival sponsored by the Center on Deafness in Chicago.