Abbie Cornish smoulders as tinseltown’s hottest new talent. She tells our correspondent how it all came to pass

Take a look at this girl – sexy, isn’t she? Just as well, because you’re going to be seeing a lot more of her. The actress Abbie Cornish is still barely a blip on the big screen – she turned 25 in August and has appeared in only a handful of films – but already, Hollywood insiders are whispering that she could be the most amazing Australian export yet. Yep, that’s ahead of her friends Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts. About to grace our screens as Cate Blanchett’s co-star in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, she is also strongly rumoured to be the next Bond girl in Bond 22, which starts shooting in January.

Still, it’s not just films that have set Hollywood tongues wagging. Tantalisingly, she took up with her co-star Ryan Phillippe when the two were making the upcoming war film Stop-Loss – a romantic entanglement that prompted Phillippe to leave his wife, Reese Witherspoon. And she is such an intoxicating beauty that tongues even started wagging again when Heath Ledger, her recent co-star in the cult Aussie movie Candy, left his fiancée, Michelle Williams. It’s easy to understand what Hollywood’s leading men might see in Cornish. Pale and bosomy, she is a deeper, more mysterious, Australian version of Scarlett Johansson, all knowing eyes and unknowing beauty. In her breakout film, Somersault, in 2004, she was unnervingly convincing as a damaged, sexually precocious 16-year-old runaway. The New York Times gushed that she had “the face of an angel, and a sexual magnetism she wields with only a partial awareness of its seismic force”.

Sitting in a hotel room in Beverly Hills, Cornish couldn’t be more relaxed. At 5ft 8in, somehow she looks taller and longer-limbed than on screen. Her piercing green eyes give an insistent quality to her face, and she moves languidly, keeping her own time and rhythm, as befits someone who never wears a watch. Dressed in a black top and Yves Saint Laurent trousers, she seems entirely comfortable with herself, despite her age and relative lack of experience. In all her roles, she seems fearless, whether she’s being fetishistically stripped of her tight corset by Clive Owen in The Golden Age, or naked, as Ledger’s heroin-addict lover in Candy.

If anything Cornish found it easier being naked. “On Candy, we could get as messy and dirty as we wanted,” she says in her light Australian accent. “But [on Golden Age] my corset couldn’t be loosened all day, except for lunch, so there was a lot of pressure on my lungs, and I just felt miserable. Then I was, like, wow, imagine how Bess, my character, must have felt. I heard horror stories that women would carry their babies to full term underneath their corsets.”

What a long way Cornish has come from the small farm north of Sydney where she grew up, the second of five children. As a kid, she barely watched television, but at 13 she entered a local teen modelling competition for a laugh, and ended up a finalist, and she’s never looked back. Within a couple of years, she was playing a quadriplegic in an Australian soap; and in 2004, she won the Australian Film Institute’s best-actress award for Somersault. She was comfortable with the attention, “because it was just about the work, because of what people felt about my performances or the story”.

One wonders, then, how such a poised young woman has dealt with her most recent brushes with notoriety. After paparazzi caught her canoodling with Phillippe, she was branded a home-wrecker in the break-up of one of Hollywood’s favourite marriages. She has always denied the reports, and sighs before replying: “It’s a strange thing. Nobody can prepare you for it. Heath told me something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘That stuff, nobody can tell you how that’s going to go. You have to find out for yourself.’ It’s really true.”

Despite those rumours, Cornish is not part of any Hollywood clique. “I don’t mind the idea of working here,” she says, “but I don’t know if I would live here long-term.” She’s more into music than networking, and you’re more likely to catch her at gigs than parties. She plays piano and guitar and composes music, and has rapped at gigs in Australia (she dated the Australian hip-hop artist Kid Lyrical). She’s also into her travelling, ever since she backpacked around Europe when she was 17. She has been to North Africa and spent six weeks in a village in Brazil learning capoeira, the Brazilian martial art cum dance. “We lived in a house with nothing. We slept in a hammock,” she says.

“When I was a kid, I always used to wonder what else is out there, because on the farm you look up at the sky and you see every star, you see the three dimensions of everything,” she says. “When I left Australia I was fascinated by the way other people feel, how different things are valued in different cultures, how happiness and fear and sadness come from this human core but shift and change. If you go to Brazil, the smile that you see on a Brazilian’s face is just its own entity. You could call it happiness, but it’s Brazilian.”

With two more films lined up (playing John Keats’s lover in the new Jane Campion, and starring with Phillippe again in Last Battle Dreamer), she’s unlikely to fit in another trip.

I ask her if she has a plan. “A plan?” she repeats. “I’ve never had much idea. It changes and shifts as I change and shift with age. I never really know what I’m doing.”

Well, let’s just say – watch this space.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age opens on November 2

Source: The Times