Born deaf, the actress Genevieve Barr makes her debut in the BBC drama The Silence, alongside Gina McKee, Douglas Henshall and Hugh Bonneville Link Barr was born deaf.
When she was a toddler her mother would sing nursery rhymes to her while she was in the bath. Barr would watch her mother’s lips intently and mouth the words back to her, silently. At four years old, she was fitted with her first hearing aids, so was able to match the mouth patterns she had seen to the sounds she now heard, and slowly started to speak out loud. Barr still wears hearing aids, but as she can’t hear all the details of sound she relies on lip-reading to complete the picture.
'I was always happy in the hearing world,’ she says, 'and felt accepted in it for just being me, so it was quite a challenge to play the part of a deaf person who seems to prefer the silent world.’ Barr plays Amelia Edwards, an 18-year-old girl who has recently been fitted with a cochlear implant, enabling her to hear. Amelia is uneasy with being hurled into the hearing world and her relationship with her mother (McKee) becomes fraught.
She goes to stay with her uncle Jim (Henshall), a police detective, and her party-loving cousins, and quickly becomes part of the family. But everything is upturned when she witnesses the murder of a policewoman. Her uncle is assigned to the case, and when Amelia identifies another police officer as one of the killers, her life is suddenly in danger. Like Amelia, Barr grew up in a hearing family; she has a sister two years younger and twin teenage siblings. Unlike her character, Barr attended regular schools, so never mixed with other deaf children and never fully learnt to use sign language.
'I tried to learn it a few times, partly because I felt ashamed for not being able to communicate with deaf people who signed, and because I wanted to explore my deaf identity,’ she says. 'But there’s just so much to learn.’ Barr learnt to sign properly for the role. 'I had to come across like I was fluent and had been signing my whole life.’ In Barr’s company, you realise quickly that she is not accustomed to failure. At 15 she played rounders for England; at 16 she was a high-board diving champion in her hometown of Harrogate; at 19 she was the captain of the Edinburgh University lacrosse team, and went on to play for Scotland. She was a straight-A student and graduated from Edinburgh two years ago with a 2.1 in English and history.
She says that she wanted to be an actress when she was growing up, but never really expected to make a career out of it. 'I did a lot of drama as a child, and was always very confident, a real attention-seeker,’ she says. 'But I never got any of the lead roles in the school plays. I always thought that it was because my voice wasn’t coherent enough for an audience and for a while I was bitter about it, though I learnt to accept it.’
The silence is due to be aired Sometime in September, it was deferred because of the World Cup football coverage.
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