The introduction of Selina, Elizabeth Hartman’s character, and the actress herself, starts from the first seconds of the film A Patch of Blue. The viewer sees her hands that move along and around when she is stringing beads. From this first scene with a close-up of the girl’s hands, the audience can understand, consciously or subconsciously, that there is something special about these movements and the girl who makes them. No sighted person would touch the objects in such a manner. To the sighted majority, the world is a place experienced first and foremost through visual images. In contrast, people deprived of sight have to switch to other information sources, such as ears to hear, nose to smell and hands or skin to touch. To Selina, the world is a combination of shapes, sounds and smells, and Hartman manages to involve the viewer into this world through empathy and, obviously, through her brilliant acting. The latter is realized via various tools of the craft of acting, such as performing in the extreme physical and environmental conditions, attention to objectives and obstacles, endowment and painting a picture with words. According to the film trivia, Elizabeth Hartman wore non-transparent lenses that literally deprived her of her otherwise good eyesight. Thus, interestingly, the issue of endowment that was aimed to visually introduce the protagonist’s eye defect to the viewers, happened to play the secondary though not least important role of “blinding” the actress. In other words, an element of the film’s mise-en-scene that was a part of the heroine’s external image served the purpose of introducing the actress to the world of the people with special needs, one of whom she portrayed. Hartman temporarily submerged into the world where eyes are no longer the primary means of assessing the world. She had to establish an alien, qualitatively new contact with the environment as a blind person would do in his or her first years of blindness, be it acquired or inborn. She had to learn how to interact with her immediate environment of objects and people, such as her acting partner Sidney Poitier who played Gordon Ralfe. Evidently, Hartman’s imposed blindness was not absolute. She could still distinguish colors, shapes and, most importantly, light and darkness, which means there was plenty of room for the woman to act. In one of the chapters, Uta Hagen discusses endowment and how a “cup of cold water becomes hot coffee and stays that way” (113). For Hartman, lenses became her half-full cup of hot coffee. In sum, a relatively simple part of a character image, such as lenses, evolved from a matter of endowment into a means of making blindness real, both for the audience and the actress. In regard to the aforementioned endowment issue, it would be appropriate to discuss the obstacles to and in Hartman’s acting. Interestingly, both the lenses and the remaining sight unimpaired by them became an obstacle for the actress. The lenses were the real, non-far-fetched obstacle. Unlike the obstacles described by Hagen, where the actor had to search for or even invent hindrance that would create the drama in their acting, lenses actually made Hartman disabled. She was not fully faking her disorientation in space or difficulty moving around objects and people. Thus, lenses created an actual physical obstacle