The big interview: Genevieve Barr

DEAFNESS played a part in Genevieve Barr’s television breakthrough as an actor. Catherine Scott talked to her about her next step.

ENEVIEVE Barr has just faced one of her stiffest tests – and she has faced more than her fair share in her 26 years on the planet.

The profoundly deaf actress has just finished filming her first hearing role in the BBC 3 series The Fades to be screened later this year.

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“It has been a challenge, but I have had some amazing help from my speech therapist and I am happy with the result,” she says. “We will have to wait and see what everyone else thinks.”

Work has been rather a long time coming since the Harrogate actress received much acclaim for her portrayal of deaf girl Amelia Edwards in the BBC drama The Silence.

It was a brave move to cast Genevieve in the role as she had hardly any experience of acting. Playing the lead in a prime-time BBC drama for a novice actress would be daunting for most but when you are deaf and your co-stars include Hugh Bonneville, Gina McKee, Dervla Kirwan and Douglas Henshall, the pressure is on.

“I did feel a huge weight of responsibility,” says Genevieve. “Everyone was really nice to me but I was acting alongside some of the best actors and actresses of the time. I didn’t want to make them look bad because I was no good.

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“I was also acting alongside younger actors who had been through drama school and I got on with them really well, but there I was, with very little acting experience in the lead role.”

In the end, Genevieve need not have worried. She and the drama were a huge success, gaining her best acting nominations; not bad for your first main role. Almost as important to Genevieve was that she was treated like anyone else. “I want people to see my as Genevieve the actress, not Genevieve the deaf actress.” That has proved trickier than she had hoped since The Silence was screened a year ago. “I suppose I was expecting more work to come in straight away. I have a great agent, but it was very hard. I split up with my boyfriend of five years and the work wasn’t coming in. I don’t really do sign language so a lot of the deaf parts weren’t right for me and people just didn’t seem prepared to give me a chance at the hearing roles. It was also hard for me to get a regular job because I needed time off for auditions and to take acting jobs if they came along.”

Not a person to be idle, Genevieve set up an acting project in London for 12 aspiring disabled actors. The project was filmed and is being developed into a documentary. She also enlisted the help of a voice coach, something she had not needed to do since being a small child when she was first diagnosed as being profoundly deaf when she was two. She believes her mother, Caroline, has a lot to do with her drive and determination and inability to give up. “Mum always told us that if you want something badly enough and are prepared to put the time and effort in, then you can achieve anything.” And in Genevieve’s case mum seems to have been proved right over and over again.

Genevieve was born the eldest of four children into a well-off North Yorkshire family. “She had failed a hearing test when she was born and we were referred to a consultant in Leeds who did further tests and said she was fine,” explains Caroline. “We went back again at 12 months and he still said she was fine. Then when we went back at 18 months expecting her to be discharged he told us she was profoundly deaf and that she would never talk or go to a mainstream school. We’d all have to learn sign language if she was going to communicate with us at all.

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“We were in a state of shock. It took six months for us to get over it. She was a very alert child who would react when you came into the room and she had some language skills even though they were a little delayed. But she could say ‘daddy’ and was by no means a withdrawn or silent child.” It was on the way home in the car from Leeds that Caroline and her husband Robert made the decision that Genevieve would learn to talk. “We decided that we wanted her to be part of a hearing world. There were to be no boundaries for her.”

“It was the best decision they ever made,” says Genevieve who is clearly very close to her family despite now living in London.

The Barrs did lots of research and took lots of advice and despite being pregnant with her second child, Antonia, Caroline dedicated her life to helping her eldest daughter communicate. She had the help of a teacher for the deaf and a speech and language therapist whom Genevieve saw weekly until she left primary school.

“Every stage of my childhood may have been an uphill battle, but my parents never gave up on their ambition to help me adapt to a hearing world that I too was a part of.

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“My mother did not work when I was young, which was a good thing considering the huge job she had on her hands. We played word games every day and she would speak into a balloon so I could feel, and thus learn, the vibrations of sound.

“When I got hearing aids, I was able to not only hear those vibrations but begin to enunciate those sounds myself. Lip-reading and using hearings aids became normal. Dad was working full-time, but he too was incredibly supportive.”

It was a landmark when, after several mainstream schools rejected her, Genevieve was accepted as a pupil at Belmont Birklands Preparatory School in Harrogate.

“I don’t ever remember feeling any different from everyone else,” she says. “I had to work a bit harder but I didn’t know any different. I do remember not getting in to the rounders team which upset me a bit, but then mum had a word and sorted that out,” she says with a wry smile to her mum. One of Genevieve’s biggest passions is sport and another area where this exceptionally intelligent and talented young woman excels.

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Despite her early rejection, she went on to play rounders for England at 14, and travelled all over the country for highboard diving competitions, bagging a silver medal in the national under-14 championships and she represented Yorkshire at lacrosse.

“It did frustrate me when my lack of hearing was a barrier in my communication with team-mates. I had to make up for this by making the best possible use of my peripheral vision and by persevering, but I still I feared I would be underestimated.”

Anyone who underestimates Genevieve Barr does so at their own peril. The fear that people might write her off because she was deaf just makes her more determined to prove them wrong.

As well as excelling in sport and being a straight-A student, Genevieve’s real love was drama.

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“I loved acting and my teacher would always thrust me forward for big roles in the school play, but it was pride before a fall every time. I would spend ages analysing the motives of the character and doing my research, but then my confidence was shattered by a humiliating rejection every year – made worse by the fact that the cast would always be announced in assembly.

“I would clap my friends, happy for them, but find the lump in my throat difficult to swallow when I was passed over yet again.”

A non-speaking rabbit in Wind in the Willows represented the high-point of her school drama career when she was a pupil at the private Harrogate Ladies College.

“I blamed my deafness, believing my speaking was not clear enough. But there was also a niggling doubt that I simply was not good enough.”

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The school did make her captain of the school debating team – no mean feat for someone who cannot hear. The achievement reduced her mother to tears.

Genevieve gave up her acting dream and embarked on a English literature and history degree at Edinburgh University where she represented Scotland at lacrosse. “As time passed, so my passion for acting faded.”

Genevieve is acutely aware of the privileged background she comes from and the limitations that might come with that. When she got the chance after university to take part in a graduate scheme called Teach First, she jumped at it. This puts top graduates into inner-city schools to teach for two years while gaining a degree in education. Genevieve, the first deaf student to take part, was sent to a secondary school in Bermondsey in south-east London.

“I have been extremely lucky in my life. But I was aware that I had lived a sheltered one. I felt I needed to go out and experience real life. I was petrified. My deafness was the obvious thing for the pupils to pick on – they would swear while turned away from me and rap on the undersides of their desks. I could hear all of this but my hearing aids do not give a direction of sound, so I could not identify the culprits. However, most of the children were great and I survived the year – tougher for having done it.”

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Genevieve was enjoying the first day of the summer holidays in 2009 when she received a text from a university friend. A production company he worked for was looking for a deaf actress for a pilot sitcom called The Amazing Dermot. Was she interested? Despite her experiences at school Genevieve agreed and got the part.

“I thought it would be a bit of fun and good experience. I didn’t take it too seriously or think it would lead anywhere. The teaching was going well. I should stick with that, a ‘proper job’, as people kept reminding me.”

After filming The Amazing Dermot, she said goodbye to acting for the second time, or so she thought. A few days later, she received an email from a casting director. The subject heading was “The Silence – BBC Drama”. The director Dearbhla Walsh had originally been looking at a hearing actress to play Amelia, a deaf girl recently fitted with a cochlear implant who witnesses the murder of a policewoman, but felt it just wasn’t right. They admit taking a gamble on Genevieve and it paid off. The Guardian wrote: “…all these actors are eclipsed by Genevieve Barr’s mesmerising performance as Amelia. She is understated and natural, totally convincing.” With such rave reviews and plaudits in her first major role you would imagine that work would be lining up for the young actress. But life is not like that.

“My future as an actress was quite uncertain after The Silence,” she says with honesty. “Although I am deaf, my impediment is a speech impediment, not a hearing impediment. It’s about people understanding what I say. It is frustrating. Acting shouldn’t be about how something is said, it should be about what is being said. It’s about the story.” The speech therapy aims to help Genevieve recreate sound in her mouth that she cannot hear. “It’s never going to be perfect. But it is considerably better than it used to be.”

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The hard work seems to be starting to pay off. She recently landed a part in Channel 4’s Shameless, playing a deaf role, to be screened in the autumn. Her proudest achievement is The Fades, written by Jamie Brittain, the man behind Skins, to be aired in the autumn.

Away from the acting world, she works for the charity Common Purpose developing a strategy to put 300 disabled students through a leadership programme. She has also advised the House of Commons Select Committee on how disabled people can be helped to integrate in the workplace. She also volunteers in a school for the deaf in London where she is learning sign language.

So what does she do in her spare time? “I recently took up rugby. Being deaf is such a small part of who I am. It does not define me or stop me achieving my dream.”

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