FROM OUT OF THE DARKNESS : Blind Actress Takes on Role Made Famous by Sighted Performers

When Audrey Hepburn was cast in the 1967 movie version of Frederick Knott’s Broadway thriller, “Wait Until Dark,” it was something of a step backward for the cause of physically impaired actors.

Hepburn was a sighted star asked to play a blind person, and whatever else the casting meant--chiefly that the producers wanted box-office appeal--it also implied that a blind actress could not handle the role.

Two decades earlier, William Wyler had upset the conventional wisdom about using handicapped performers by casting Harold Russell--a soldier whose hands had been amputated--in a key supporting role for his masterful 1946 movie, “The Best Years of Our Lives.”

It turned out that audiences did not flee in droves when confronted on screen by someone wearing prosthetic devices as some Hollywood mavens had feared. The movie was not only a smash hit, but Russell won an Academy Award for his performance.

Since then Marlee Matlin, who is deaf, has become the most prominent actress to show that someone with both hearing and speech impairments can perform as well as, and perhaps better than, her so-called normal counterparts. She won an Oscar in 1987 for her starring role in “Children of a Lesser God.”

Now Millicent Collinsworth, who is blind, hopes to demonstrate that, far from being handicapped by her impairment, she too can put on a great performance. Collinsworth will star in a stage revival of “Wait Until Dark” at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse. It opens Thursday.

“I don’t think of myself as a blind person until I run into a wall or knock myself out on a tree,” said the actress. “My agent is so determined to break down the prejudices of casting directors that he even sends me out for sighted roles. On my resume he lists blindness under ‘special skills.’ ”

Sitting in the empty playhouse before a rehearsal one day last week with her black Labrador retriever, Eeyore, who was relaxing off his harness but listening intently to the sound of her voice, Collinsworth recounted gleefully that she recently managed to land a sighted role on an episode of the daytime TV soap, “Superior Court.”

“That’s the good news,” she said. “The bad news is I had to play a paraplegic. They said, ‘You are definitely going to be sighted. But you can’t walk.’ So they put me in a wheelchair and threw a blanket around my supposedly withered limbs. Then, during the shooting, the director said: ‘Do you think you could roll the chair yourself?’ Golly! Gee whiz! I guess because I’m blind I’m not supposed to be able to do anything. Well, I hit my marks.”

Collinsworth learned of the Costa Mesa production of “Wait Until Dark” when director Jim Ryan put out a casting call for blind actresses with the Screen Actors Guild. “I admire him for doing this,” she said, “because the role was written for a sighted person. And let’s face it, he has run into some brick walls himself trying to work with me. There are things in the script a blind person just wouldn’t do. I tend to play it realistically. He keeps telling me to be more theatrical.”

The play revolves around a blind woman who is unwittingly caught in a deadly conflict between an evil drug dealer and two petty thieves. They break into her apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village and terrorize her during their search for a stash of heroin they believe is hidden there. (Lee Remick originated the starring role on Broadway in 1965.) It is only when the apartment is thrown into complete darkness that the woman can defend herself on more or less equal terms.

Collinsworth, 38, said she was blinded in a 1979 accident in Irvine. The actress recounted that she was walking by a construction site where workers were taking down a huge gazebo. One of them lost his balance on a ladder and dropped his hammer. It hit her between the eyes, causing irreparable nerve damage.

Despite nine eye operations and plastic surgery on her face--”You’re looking at my third nose”--Collinsworth has no visible facial scars. Moreover, her gray eyes are so large and clear it seems impossible that they can’t see. In fact, it is difficult to tell at first that she is blind because she moves as comfortably as a sighted person.

“That’s because I have a frame of reference,” she said. “When I lost my sight, as terrified and desperate as I was, I at least knew what the world looked like. My real goal is to break away from the stereotype that if you’re disabled you have to be fragile or that you have to be the eternal victim. I think of myself as an aggressive woman who has talent and who, by the way, happens to be blind.”

Ironically, the opening of “Wait Until Dark” will come exactly 2 years to the day that Collinsworth was victimized by violence on a crowded Los Angeles bus in an incident that drew front-page headlines in The Times. On her way home with Eeyore during the rush hour, she was caught in a melee when passengers began to shove. One man went berserk and beat her face bloody.

Nobody came to her aid either on the bus or when she managed to get off except for Eeyore, who led her 15 blocks home through a neighborhood he had never navigated. (Eeyore, who is named for a character in “Winnie the Pooh,” was later cited as “Hero Dog” of the year by the Los Angeles Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.) Once home, Collinsworth was taken to a hospital by a neighbor who was shocked by how badly she was bleeding.

“I got hundreds and hundreds of letters from all over the country,” she recalled. The incident also caught the attention of TV producer Jay Bernstein, who asked her to re-enact it for an episode of the CBS police series “Houston Knights” in 1987.

Since then, Collinsworth has become active in raising public awareness of violence towards women, the disabled and the elderly. Several weeks ago, for instance, she was the guest star in an episode of CBS’s “Designing Women.” It revolved around a class in women’s self-defense. She played the martial arts instructor.

“The premise was that if a blind lady could do this stuff, then anybody could,” said Collinsworth, who also is a member of SAG’s national committee for the disabled, which lobbies for employment of physically impaired actors in movies and television.

Meanwhile, she maintained that being blind has made her a better actress. “I don’t want to generalize,” she said, “but most actors are so busy thinking of their next line they don’t listen. When you’re blind, you’re forced to listen. You develop an intimacy and an intensity in your performance that otherwise might not be there.”

Besides enhancing her skills, she joked, her impairment also has changed the way she is perceived at casting calls. “Before, when I used to go on auditions, the reaction always was, ‘Well, she has a pretty face, but can she act?’ Now I’m no longer looked at as a sex object,” she said. “It’s a wonderful relief.”

“Wait Until Dark” opens Thursday at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse, 661 Hamilton St. It will play through June 24. Curtain times are 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Tickets: $6.50 to $7.50. Information: (714) 650-5269.