For the hardy few to whom “Beverly Lewis’ The Confession” really is the much-anticipated sequel to “The Shunning,” its arrival is no doubt good news. To the rest of the world, this Hallmark Channel movie derived from the second of Lewis’ “The Heritage of Lancaster County” books is distinguished by possessing slightly more edge than the network’s standard fare, and a solid tandem in Katie Leclerc (“Switched at Birth”) and Sherry Stringfield (was “ER” really that long ago?) as its leads. It’s also enough of a stand-alone story one needn’t have thrilled to part one to join the buggy ride.

Leclerc plays Katie, who was “shunned” by the Amish community that raised her in the first film. Now out in the modern world, she seeks to reconnect with her birth mother, Laura (Stringfield), a wealthy socialite who early on is presented with a fatal cancer diagnosis. This comes as bad news to Laura’s leech of a husband, Dylan (Adrian Paul), who needs his wife’s money to finance his gambling habit. Fearing he will lose his inheritance when he hears from Katie, he seizes on a scheme to pass off a struggling actress (“Once and Again’s” Julia Whelan) as Katie, hoping to secure access to his wife’s estate before she dies.

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The new trailer for My Synthesized Life, the web series Katie is a part of, is out! Be sure to like their facebook page https://www.facebook.com/MySynthesizedLife

When Hallmark Channel premiered Beverly Lewis’ The Shunning in 2011, it generated huge acclaim and sparkling ratings for its story of family ties and betrayal in the close-knit Amish community in Lancaster County. Now the World Premiere of Beverly Lewis’ The Confession, a Hallmark Channel Original Movie based on the second novel in the Heritage of Lancaster County Books series from the New York Times bestselling author Beverly Lewis, will premiere on Saturday, May 11 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

The film stars three-time Emmy and two-time Golden Globe® nominee Sherry Stringfield (GUIDING LIGHT, ER) as Laura Mayfield-Bennett, a wealthy socialite and benefactor who is beset by terminal cancer. One of Laura’s great regrets was her having put her only child up for adoption years before.

But Laura believes her prayers have been answered when she’s contacted by a woman named Alyson (Julia Whelan, ONCE AND AGAIN) who claims to be her long-lost Amish daughter. Except that it’s a fraud perpetrated by Laura’s scheming, compulsive gambling, husband Dylan (Adrian Paul, HIGHLANDER). Dylan concocts a plan to insert himself back into the financial picture after discovering he’s going to be left nothing in Laura’s will. So he hires Alyson, a struggling waitress, to pretend that she’s the Amish daughter Laura never knew, hoping to receive the majority of Laura’s estate.

But as luck would have it, Laura’s real daughter, Katie (Katie Leclerc, SWITCHED AT BIRTH) shows up after having been shunned by her Amish community and desperately wants to meet and have a relationship with her real mom.

As the secrets pile up in Beverly Lewis’ The Confession, the family bonds are challenged. But the film teaches us that love ultimately wins out in the end.

Thirty-nine recipients of the 72nd Annual Peabody Awards were announced today by the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The winners, chosen by the Peabody board as the best in electronic media for the year 2012, were named in a ceremony in the Peabody Gallery on the UGA Campus.

Other entertainment winners included the FX series “Louie,” comedian Louis C.K.’s serrated, boundary-testing take on being a single, showbiz dad; “Southland,” TNT’s richly nuanced drama about Los Angeles police; “Inside the National Recording Registry,” a delightful series of radio documentaries about recorded music chosen for inclusion in that archive; and “Switched At Birth,” an ABC Family drama whose multicultural elements include major characters who are deaf.

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Katie is up in the Portrat Magazine “TV Yearbook: Most Likely to Succeed” poll – VOTE HERE

One of the TV/media reporters has an awesome new article up about last week’s episode of Switched at Birth – READ IT HERE

Here is Katie’s commercial for Purple Communications!

Katie Leclerc is the new face – and more importantly – the ASL-fluent ‘hands’ for Purple Communications, a leading provider of video relay service (VRS) and interpreting services for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. Leclerc will make her Purple debut in a TV commercial aired entirely in ASL.
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130304/SF70279)
“We’re delighted to be working with Katie as Purple enters the next generation in delivering communications services to people who are deaf, as well as those who interact with them on the telephone,” said Purple Communications CEO and President John Ferron . “We thought the innovation of an all-ASL episode of Switched at Birth – never done before on TV – was the perfect venue to announce our partnership with Katie and reflects the innovative spirit of Purple’s new revolutionary products and services in 2013.”
Leclerc says, “I am excited to work with Purple and provide a bridge between the hearing and non-hearing worlds. Communications access for all is a philosophy I share with Purple and dramatize on screen through my work on Switched at Birth.”
Leclerc learned to sign when she was 17. Together with her sister — an ASL teacher — and her father, Leclerc suffers from a genetic inner ear disorder called Meniere’s disease, which can cause sporadic hearing loss.
“Being able to communicate is a right that I believe everyone should enjoy, which is why I am excited to educate both hearing and deaf communities about Purple’s products and services. Purple brings the two communities together using technology as an equalizer. I look forward to working together with them to ensure that equal communications access is readily available for the more than 36 million deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans, as well as their families, friends and colleagues.”

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Fans of the ABC Family drama are no strangers to the show’s many ASL-scenes, which include subtitles for those who not fluent in signing. However, this will be the first episode of the show — not to mention the first in TV history — to feature ASL only. “I always thought would be a Season 8 thing when we’re off the network’s radar and to the network’s credit, they were the ones that came to me and said, ‘Let’s do it now,” creator and executive producer Lizzy Weiss says. “It’s an experiment. We’re all sort of figuring it out as we go.”

The episode, set to air on March 4, will reportedly be told from the perspectives of the show’s many deaf characters, which is why hearing characters will be seen but not heard. “The writers and I were challenged to think in a more visual way because we didn’t want it to just be a regular episode with a lot of captions, so the script even looks different,” Weiss says. “We’re trying to show not only, ‘Oh gee, it’s really hard … but, ‘Hey, there are all these cool things that you can do in sign language that hearing people can’t.’ You can communicate across a theater privately and other little tricks. We’re just having fun with it.”

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Burbank, CA (January 11, 2013) – ABC Family’s award-winning original series, “Switched At Birth,” will produce an episode told entirely in American Sign Language (ASL), a first for a scripted series on mainstream television, which will premiere Monday, March 4 at 8:00PM ET/PT.

The special episode will be told from the perspective of the series’ multiple deaf characters – with open captions for hearing viewers – in a storyline that puts the audience in the middle of a student uprising in which the very essence of their deaf identity is at stake. Now in its second season, “Switched At Birth” is the first mainstream television series to have multiple deaf and hard-of-hearing series regulars and scenes shot entirely in ASL.

“I’ve been wanting to do an all-ASL episode since the series began, and the storyline we’ve been focusing on this season gave us the perfect opportunity. It’s an exciting, visual, empowering story of kids who are different fighting back, and it allows our audience to experience the world as our deaf characters do. We’ve been building to this for 39 episodes and we’re all thrilled to be the first to try this,” said series creator and Executive Producer Lizzy Weiss.

Katie Leclerc is mostly vegetarian as Daphne on “Switched at Birth,” which returns to ABC Family with new episodes Jan. 7, and she’s been heading in that direction off screen as well. “I eat very little red meat, no pork for about a year and a half now,” she says, adding that she’s also investigating a gluten-free diet after seeing how it helped her nine-year-old nephew. The boy is “borderline Asperger’s,” and after eating gluten-free and dairy-free for a week, he was able to hold a phone conversation with her for the first time. “It helped with his focus and attention. I was elated.”

Leclerc and her boyfriend Ryan recently adopted a deaf dog, though they weren’t aware of that until they brought him home and he wasn’t responding to them or other dogs. For Leclerc, who has partial hearing loss and plays a deaf character on “Switched,” that wasn’t a problem. “We taught him sign language, signs for lie down, get the ball, eat, water. He knows about 20 signs now,” she reports, calling the one and a half year-old Australian cattle dog, named Gus, “our pride and joy.”

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