'Blindness' hits close to home for Ruffalo

TORONTO — If instead of "Blindness," you called the new film by Fernando Meirelles "Illness," you might be telling the life story of actor <<<< Mark Ruffalo. In "Blindness," based on the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer Jose Saramago, Ruffalo plays an eye doctor who must lose his sight before he can see his life. "And when I told him the story," Meirelles said during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, "he said 'Fernando, this is my story.'" In 2001, Ruffalo learned he had a brain tumor called an acoustic neuroma, which could have become life-threatening if left untreated. He underwent a 10-hour microscopic surgery, struggled with complications while recovering in New York at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks and didn't act for a year. But with three new films coming to theaters — including, in... [read full story]