Temple Grandin on Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin is America’s best-known autistic person, and she’s about to become much more famous. On February 6, HBO debuts a feature film that stars Claire Danes as the gawky, socially impaired but brilliant animal scientist who, despite her disability — or in many ways, because of it — has achieved enormous success in two arenas: as designer of humane cattle-handling facilities and an author and outspoken voice on autism. The movie, Temple Grandin, tracks Grandin’s early years as a child who had no speech and very little connection to the world at age four, through her painful humiliations in school, to her ultimate success in cowboy country. Claudia Wallis talked to Grandin, now 62 and a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, about the biopic.
How close did Claire Danes come to matching your own memories of your early life?
It was like going into a strange time machine. She became me back in the ‘60s and 70’s.
(See pictures of a severely autistic boy and the woman who cares for him.)
Including that odd, rapid way of talking? You don’t quite sound like that now.
That’s the way I used to be. The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get better. You get less and less autistic-like, if you keep doing things and getting exposed to things that help you develop.
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