Adam Chitayat · CC BY-SA 4.0

Deaf since eighteen months old, she made her acting debut at twenty-one playing Sarah Norman in Children of a Lesser God (1986) and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for it — still the only deaf performer to win an Oscar, and the youngest woman ever to win in that category. She has worked mostly in television since, from The West Wing to Switched at Birth, and has spent much of her public life advocating for deaf representation in Hollywood.