VIDEO LINKS:
- Movies: The Golden Age

Warning: Captures will contain spoilers to those of you who have not seen the film!

GALLERY LINKS:
- The Golden Age: DVD Screencaptures
- The Golden Age: DVD Screencaptures – Deleted Scenes
- The Golden Age: DVD Screencaptures – Making Of
- The Golden Age: DVD Screencaptures – Inside Elizabeth’s World
- The Golden Age: DVD Screencaptures – Towers, Courts & Cathedrals
- The Golden Age: DVD Screencaptures – Menus

- Audio commentary from director Shekhar Kapur
- Deleted scenes
- Featurettes: The Reign Continues: Making Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Inside Elizabeth’s World, Commanding the Winds: Creating the Armada and Towers, Couters and Catherdals.

You can pre-order a copy on Amazon. Stay tuned to Abbie Cornish Online when the big day comes for screencaps.

Pedants and trainspotters need not apply to see Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Abbie Cornish’s advice to those who will take inevitable issue with the facts, which have been stretched, tweaked, and in some cases just plain stomped on? Go see a documentary.

“This is a film and in order for it to work certain things have to be compacted and moved and if people want to know exact times and dates and places, they’re quite free to research that,” she says.

The director of the second instalment in the film life of Queen Elizabeth, Shekhar Kapur, is equally dismissive.

“We all fall in the trap of locking ourselves into moments of history as we interpret them, and what is history but an interpretation of events,” he says.

“With the last film people said `But she was a virgin’ and I said `In my opinion her virginity was a political statement’ and that was a big thing. How do we know? The fact is we don’t need to know. History doesn’t need to be perfect. Why are we reading history except to see how those lives reflect upon our lives?”

It’s not just historians who take issue over the film. The Italian Bishops’ Conference recently attacked it as a “concerted attack on Catholicism”.

“I think any film that deals with such large issues, especially issues of history, is going to raise some sort of conflict of interest or different opinions. It’s kind of natural that those things would arise,” Cornish — who plays Elizabeth’s lady in waiting Bess — says diplomatically.

It’s just those kind of issues that made Kapur so intent on revisiting Elizabeth’s story. The Golden Age depicts the struggle between Protestant England and Catholic Spain that led to the Spanish armada’s notorious defeat — a faith-based battle relevant to today’s.

“This conflict with intolerance and fundamentalism is not a new conflict,” Kapur notes.

“We don’t look at ourselves as universal beings, we look at ourselves in much more narrow, defined terms. The further we go away from our sense of universality, our sense of the spiritual, we get into more conflicts because we define ourselves as individual selves and we do that against somebody else, rather than saying we’re the same.”

Kapur famously had to twist his star Cate Blanchett’s arm to take on the role. Within two weeks of telling Hit she wasn’t going to do it, she had signed on. Some might interpret that as an actor’s power play for more money. Kapur disagrees.

“I don’t think that was a power play. That was serious doubt. It took a lot of convincing for her to do it and I didn’t do so much convincing. Ultimately it was Geoffrey Rush who convinced her.

“He said, ‘Cate, there’s no reason not to be doing this’. It’s all Geoffrey’s doing. My powers of persuasion failed.”

According to Cornish, the convincing wasn’t required because Blanchett’s role required her to be usurped by a younger woman.

“She has huge range and is someone who makes decisions that will challenge her,” Cornish says.

Kapur agrees his star doesn’t consider issues of vanity. In The Golden Age Blanchett is not only usurped, she’s also shown to be ageing.

“I can remember Cate looking at the make-up and saying `Can’t you make me look older?’ ” Kapur says.

And it was Blanchett herself who suggested Cornish for the role.

“I was quite taken by her,” Kapur says of an early encounter with Cornish at the Toronto Film Festival.

“I was actually surprised when her agent rang me and said she’d love to do that film. I thought by that time she’d have become a hot Hollywood actress far out of reach for the second role.”

Cornish is quickly becoming just that, with two films with Ryan Phillippe (Stop Loss and Last Battle Dreamer) on her slate, a starring role in Jane Campion’s next film Bright Star and her very own Hollywood scandal (she was named as the other woman in the demise of Phillippe’s marriage to Reese Witherspoon, a piece of gossip she denied in a statement at the time).

Cornish, a serene and deathly serious young woman, nods at the inevitable question about Phillippe, then softly responds, “I prefer not to talk about that if that’s cool”.

About the only rumour she is happy to discuss is the rather puzzling one, which started when fellow Australian actor Rose Byrne told the world Cornish was set to be the next Bond girl.

“It was funny, my agent was calling everyone saying no it’s not true,” she says.

Since she never auditioned for the role, Cornish was as taken aback by the claim as anyone.
Between living out of a suitcase as a working actor, Cornish makes time for a cause she’s passionate about, animals. She’s an ambassador for Animal Club, the children’s arm of the Voiceless animal welfare charity.

“I really feel that every child is born with a very pure core in that they have compassion for all living things and an understanding to protect all living things,” she says.

“What Animal Club is doing is nurturing that very pure honest part of us and encouraging that part and it’s so beautiful.”

Source: News.com.au

Shekhar Kapur’s vivid melodrama was the first period piece of the 25-year-old’s short but successful career. The prospect made her nervous. Yet production staff were able to supply information, including a portrait of the real lady-in-waiting, where Cornish saw a dancer’s graceful hand and realised how gentle the character was.

The key revelation came in the first week of shooting in England this year.

“After day five I was quite miserable because of the costumes – I couldn’t lay down and nap. I had to sit up straight and sleep with a doona under my skirt. I had to be constantly aware of where I was walking because the dresses are so long. And wearing the corset literally moved your internal organs and you couldn’t take a full breath,” Cornish says.

“I was sitting in my trailer, just sighing to myself. I don’t watch television, so I was sitting there and I realised that this is how Bess must have lived every single day of her life. Beautiful clothes, exquisite jewellery, one of the best jobs available to a woman at the time, yet she must have felt like she was in a cage, so constrained that she couldn’t even take a proper breath.”

In the film, Bess is one point of the love triangle that involves her sponsor, Elizabeth, and the adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen). Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, sends Bess towards Raleigh, using the younger woman as a kind of surrogate. The monarch’s pleasure is thwarted when Bess and Raleigh fall in love against the backdrop of the looming invasion by the Spanish Armada.

Bess was one of the last parts cast and Kapur felt Cornish had the necessary qualities to satisfy a demanding role.

“I was taken with her absolute conviction,” he says. “If you think of the spirit and the flesh there is something in Abbie that is very much of the flesh. I wanted her to be a little mysterious, unknown. While everyone was reacting around her and turning, there’s this mysterious person in the middle of it. Abbie has a lot of mystery to her – when you shoot her face you’re intrigued by what she’s thinking and that’s a huge asset for an actor.”

Cornish was just as impressed with Kapur, who would never raise his voice on set or distance himself from the actors by sitting behind monitors. Even when he merely wanted to do another take, he would come out and speak with the actors.

“He has an infinite amount of time for everyone he works with and as an actor you feel awakened and challenged,” she says.

Cornish, who grew up on a farm near Maitland, no longer has a home, instead travelling from set to set and keeping most of her possessions in storage.

She will next star opposite British actor Ben Whishaw in Bright Star, a 19th-century biopic about the poet John Keats, written and directed by Jane Campion. Cornish hopes that shoot will be as rewarding as The Golden Age, where she appreciated the breadth of her co-stars’ talents.

“You can just feel it,” Cornish says. “Things just happen in the moment and they exist – you don’t have to force things. All my scenes with Cate, Geoffrey [Rush] and Clive had a feeling of ease – and I had that same feeling with Heath [Ledger] in Candy – so no matter what the concept is, be it a stillbirth or drug use or a big fight, you’re in a process of giving and receiving and that’s easy with them. You don’t have to push to create anything.”

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

While Elizabeth newcomer Clive Owen adds hunk factor to the film, it is Newcastle farm girl Abbie Cornish who has big-name Hollywood directors talking.

Sultry good looks aside, Kapur says it was the 25-year-old’s Australian Film Institute (AFI) Award-winning performance as a teen runaway in Somersault that drew him to her.

“How could you not find Abbie after seeing Somersault?” Kapur says when asked about discovering her exceptional acting talents.

“I saw Somersault and was so taken that someone at this young age could actually give such an internal, but stirring performance.

“I had been thinking about her since then and I was surprised when she called me and her agent said she would like to do this part, because I heard that every part in Hollywood had been offered to her.”

Portraying the Queen’s closest confident and lady in waiting, Bess, the earthy Cornish, who has weathered her fair share of tabloid gossip since arriving in Hollywood, says inhabiting the character for the film was a great experience.

“I feel with Bess, there are layers to her and I sense that there was this real search for spirit that was going on in her mind and dreams,” Cornish reflects.

“There was this person that would conduct themselves in the court, but have this spirit to drift off into her own imagination. She was an interesting character to play. It was a real journey to play a servant to someone whose family was being tortured and killed, to all of a sudden have her life in danger, to find this man who she is having feelings about. It was a nice little journey.”

A nice little journey indeed, and one that will continue for Cornish, who left the family farm in the Hunter Valley at 16. From witnessing the birth of her siblings, to featuring opposite some of the world’s most famous leading men including Russell Crowe in A Good Year and Heath Ledger in Candy, Cornish’s story is in perpetual motion.

She will next sink her teeth into the historical feature, Last Battle Dreamer. The film also stars Ryan Phillippe, 32, the ex-husband of Reese Witherspoon and the very same man Cornish first shared an on-screen chemistry with in Stop Loss, which is due for release next year.

As gossip magazines hit overdrive, reporting Cornish was the reason behind the golden Hollywood marriage of Witherspoon and Phillippe crumbling, the actress was forced to deny rumours of romance, saying simply the pair were “just friends”.

These days the star is more focused on channelling her energy into preparing for Last Battle Dreamer and her following project, as 19th century poet John Keats’s lover in Jane Campion’s film Bright Star.

“I am like a horse at a starting gate at the moment, now that I have had a break I am ready,” Cornish says.

“I am just really focused on the next two films because they are both quite challenging and different roles for me. I have never done them before so it’s kind of scary and exciting. I can’t wait to start.”

By the way, Abbie has recently been featured in the Australian press quite a bit. Unfortunately there is no way for us to get all of this coverage as neither of us is actually from ‘Down Under’. If you can help with scans, please contact us! Full credit will, of course, be given!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Elizabeth: The Golden Age Melbourne Premiere
- Elizabeth: The Golden Age Melboune Premiere – Herald Sun Interview

She’s the Australian Scarlett Johansson; the next Cate Blanchett or the next Nicole Kidman; an actor tipped to be more popular internationally than Naomi Watts.

Yet 25-year-old Abbie Cornish, back home briefly to join co-stars Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush in launching the Australian release of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, says she’s unfazed by the comparisons.

Despite a cold, she’s on the phone from the venue for the Elizabeth publicity event, the Sydney Theatre Company.

“I take all that stuff as a compliment. They’re all wonderful actresses and to be compared with them . . .” says Cornish, who attracted international film interest with her lead role in Cate Shortland’s 2004′s multiple award-winning drama Somersault.

Critics Down Under loved her performance and, on other side of the world, The New York Times reviewer enthused that the Australian newcomer had “the face of an angel, and a sexual magnetism she wields with only a partial awareness of its seismic force”.

Yet Cornish says she’s happiest back home on her family farm in the Hunter Valley area near Newcastle, mucking around with the animals.

“I live in the Hunter or in Melbourne – they’re home. I travel to where I have to work, but . . . I love Australia and Australians,” she says.

Director Shekhar Kapur knew he wanted Cornish – all but unknown outside Australia – to join Blanchett and Rush and British actor Clive Owen (Sir Walter Raleigh) in his sequel to his 1998 box-office smash, Elizabeth, which earned Blanchett an Oscar Best Actress nomination, with the award controversially going to Gwyneth Paltrow for Shakespeare in Love.

In the much-anticipated sequel, Cornish is the Queen’s young and attractive lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth “Bess” Throckmorton.

The film’s producers wanted someone who expressed freshness, youth and energy, somebody on whom Elizabeth could reflect as being a younger version of herself. Someone who also had the acting ability and charisma to hold her own opposite the charismatic Blanchett.

Cornish confirmed her credentials with her eye-opening performance in Somersault, backed up by her work on Candy with fellow Australian Heath Ledger.

Says Cornish of the regular appearance of other Australian names in her film work, either as actors or directors: “It’s a happy coincidence. It’s wonderful, though, having someone from home. Filmmaking can be foreign and scary, and the Aussies have a way of looking out for one another.

“On A Good Year, Russell Crowe looked out for me, and although I hadn’t met Cate before this film, she was so helpful. (Rush was an earlier co-star in Candy).”

Cornish says she found the character of Bess in Elizabeth: The Golden Age “intriguing”. “She carries both light and dark. Shekhar has an ability to dive in and explore something endlessly and without limits, without any boundaries.”

Costume fittings were long and detailed when preparing for the film, and the uncommon experience of a tight corset made work uncomfortable for the star.

“(Costume designer) Alex Byrne did marvellous work for the film, collecting materials from all over. The costumes are just breathtaking,” Cornish says.

In fact she found them so attractive she hopes to add a couple of items she wears in the film to her wardrobe when the new film has been launched around the world.

“I think there are going to be exhibitions involving the costumes, but there’s a green bolero jacket I wear when I’m riding with the Queen that I have been promised some time in the future. I just fell in love with it.”

Cornish says she did a lot of reading to prepare for the role, and was able to learn much about the background to her character before turning up on set.

“We also had an Elizabethan expert available on set, Justin, and I was always bugging him for information about Bess – how she’d sit, where she’d be sitting at dinner, how low she’d curtsy to the Queen, other things about the etiquette of the period. He was an amazing source of knowledge, and that made it a bit easier.

“I act on cue, but the actual process of thinking about your character doesn’t leave while you’re doing the work – her place in the story. That doesn’t leave you.”

On the telephone, Cornish is as enthusiastic about her work as she was when talking about Somersault three years ago when she was almost unknown – except to dedicated viewers of ABC-TV’s Wildside series.

But her increasing celebrity has added pressures to her private life away from film sets, such as her rumoured romance with actor Ryan Phillippe that may have played a part in his split from his wife, Oscar-winner Reese Witherspoon.

Cornish was branded as “the other woman” in the messy break-up, but she’s still not interested in talking on the record about the status of her relationship with Phillippe – her co-star in the Iraq war drama, Stop Loss, which was directed by Kimberly (Boys Don’t Cry) Peirce and will be released next March. Phillipe is also appearing in her next film, the Viking epic Last Battle Dreamer, to start filming “somewhere in Europe – they don’t know yet” in the next few weeks.

“I prefer to talk about my work, not my private life,” Cornish says politely.

Her schedule is filling so rapidly with future film commitments that the girl who enjoys mucking about on the property may find it difficult to squeeze in the regular visits she has enjoyed in the recent past.

From Last Battle Dreamer she will go to work with acclaimed director Jane Campion on Bright Star, a drama centred on the life of English poet John Keats, to be played by English actor Ben Whishaw.

“I’m excited about working with Jane Campion. It’s going to be a really beautiful film about Keats and his love life,” she says.

Cornish will play Keats’s lover, Fanny Brawne.

“Then there’s an Australian film I’m hoping to do next year as well,” she says, without disclosing any details of this project.

The hectic round of press commitments linked to Elizabeth: The Golden Age hasn’t deterred the young star from finding time for a personal project. She reveals that at the end of this telephone interview, she’ll be recording a video message for the annual dinner of the Animal Club, connected with the animal rights organisation Voiceless.

“I will be working overseas and I can’t get to the dinner,” says Cornish, who is an ambassador for the children’s club.

“I love all animals, although I can’t have a pet of my own on the farm. I’m away too much now.”

Her new film may be centred on “the golden age” of the virgin queen, but the in-demand Cornish is also progressing through her own golden age.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age opens next Thursday.

Source: The Courier-Mail

The film opened in the UK on Friday. I just saw it myself and I really loved Abbie’s performance as Bess. Be sure to go and check out Elizabeth: The Golden Age, it is one to see.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Elizabeth: The Golden Age Sydney Premiere
- Elizabeth: The Golden Age Sydney Photocall

Recently returned from a whirlwind press tour for the film, Cornish spent the first half of this week hanging out at her family’s farm at Lochinvar in the Hunter Valley with “the turkeys, ducks, geese, cows and horses … because it is spring and all the animals are having babies, it is just the best season”, a besotted Cornish told Stay in Touch.

Cornish is the ambassador for Animal Club, the kids’ arm of the animal rights organisation Voiceless, run by Brian and Ondine Sherman, from Paddington’s Sherman Galleries.

Cornish was the guest of honour at the organisation’s 2006 annual grants dinner, for schools and community groups working for animal welfare, and participates in school workshops with the organisation when in town.

But with two back-to-back overseas film shoots keeping Cornish overseas until May next year, recipients at this year’s dinner, slated for December, will have to make do with a video message, to be recorded this afternoon, following an early- morning press conference for Elizabeth. Phew.

“As we move into a Westernised world, we move away from a connection with other living things,” said Cornish, who has been a vegetarian since she was 13 and as a child harboured ambitions to be a vet. “There is this disconnection between the steak that is on our plate and where it came from.”

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

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

The Lionsgate release Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?, debuted as the No. 1 weekend movie with $21.5 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. Perry’s flick came in well ahead of Clooney’s legal drama Michael Clayton, Blanchett’s historical pageant Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg’s crime saga We Own the Night, which all pulled in modest crowds.

Universal’s The Golden Age, was No. 6 with $6.2 million at 2,001 locations. The historical drama’s marketing tried to dazzle with colorful imagery, but the picture didn’t stand out among recent productions about England’s queens. Its 1998 predecessor, Elizabeth, was a platform release, peaking at 624 theaters, and grossed $30.1 million by the end of its run, a total that The Golden Age is not likely to come close to.

1.) Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?, $21.5 million.
2.) The Game Plan, $11.5 million.
3.) Michael Clayton, $11.01 million.
4.) We Own the Night, $11 million.
5.) The Heartbreak Kid, $7.4 million.
6. Elizabeth: The Golden Age, $6.2 million.

Source: Yahoo! Movies & Box Office Mojo

Seems that the first Queen Elizabeth had a lady-in-waiting named Bess Throckmorton who was younger, prettier and who was able to party with the royal courtiers while the frustrated Queen had to behave. In Elizabeth: The Golden Age, a sequel to 1998′s Elizabeth, the luminous Cate Blanchett is again the virgin queen but Bess is played by pretty young Aussie actress Abbie Cornish. Abbie came from a farm in New South Wales to model as a 13-year-old then co-star in an Aussie soap at age 15. She played a sex-addicted teen in the racy film Somersault and co-stared with Heath Ledger in Candy, a movie about a drug-addicted young couple. You can see her next year in Stop Loss, the film that started all those rumors about her and actor Ryan Phillippe.

When we chatted with Abbie recently near Rodeo Drive, we learned that she always researches her characters thoroughly and had fun wearing period costumes in Golden Age. Her modern, all black outfit for the interview consisted of a pieces by Rebecca Taylor, Calvin Klein and Yves St. Laurent; pants with belt and a blouse with long lace sleeves. Blonde Abbie wore several rings, including a lovely turquoise one on her ring finger. We got the scoop on how a modern girl transforms into a 17th century woman, how Abbie developed a relationship with Cate and hey, what was it like dancing with hot Clive Owen [who plays a very dashing Sir Walter Raleigh]?

TeenHollywood: When you learned you were going to get the part, did you research the period and did you learn about the real Bess?

Abbie: Yeah. I really wanted to know about the real Bess. I felt that it was very important to create some sense of connection to her and it’s difficult because not an extensive amount is written about Bess but I gathered the bits that I could. We had an historian on board, and [I was] just questioning him about little things. About how do I stand when she walks in? Does she kneel? How far down does she bow? And all these little things I guess.

TeenHollywood: Was there anything you learned that really got to you?

Abbie: Well, the most interesting thing, and the most creative insight for me into Bess came in a portrait. I found this portrait of her in a book which just pushed through the image and went straight through me. And it’s difficult because there are no real photographs of a person around that time so you have to rely on an artist’s interpretation. But there was something I felt was coming through this portrait and so I got it blown up really big. These people put it in my trailer and so I would see her when I came in, when I left, and I would check in with her. Bess didn’t have blue eyes in the film, but [the portrait had] these very blue, very open, almost ocean-like eyes and there was this slight smile on her face but the lips were pursed so here was a happiness and contentment, a sort of a givingness to the moment but a constriction. There was something about her that was dreaming of something outside of that moment. And so that I felt affected me.

TeenHollywood: Do you feel that it’s easy for you to really get into the era and the character when you are in costume?

Abbie: I think it does make a difference. I found, unexpectedly actually, that the costumes for me became key to who to Bess was. It was a passionate feeling about her life at that particular point in time. The first week on set of wearing the corset, I felt very restricted and I felt I couldn’t breathe property. I didn’t have my full lung capacity and I actually felt a little bit miserable and I started wonder, ‘Wow, this woman has one of the most prestigious jobs in the court and she has beautiful clothes, beautiful jewellery and yet she can’t breathe properly. There’s a lack of freedom’. And that got me thinking, you know. ‘How does she feel?’ There’s an exterior and then there’s an interior which is quite constraining. There’s a feeling of constraint and restriction there.

TeenHollywood: What was your favourite costume?

Abbie: My favorite is the pink costume. You don’t see it for very long but at the very end where the Queen comes in and says ‘Are you with child?’ And she says ‘Yes, my husband’s child’. The pink one. I just love it.

TeenHollywood: That was beautiful. There is a great dance scene with Clive Owen in front of the queen. He lifts you waaay up in the air. Was that fun?

Abbie: [grins] Yeah that was really fun. It was interesting learning that dance. The first day I was like ‘Do we have to do the real thing today?’ because, in your own clothes, it’s really different than when you’re in this whole outfit with layers and layers of material. I was kind of a little bit shy and it’s very physical and upfront but on the day it’s a different thing. You get into that world and that sense of the court. It was fun learning that.

TeenHollywood: You’re among quite a few young Australian actresses finding fame in the film business. Are you concerned about what fame will do to your personal life?

Abbie: I just spend a lot of time with my friends and with my family. I love them very much and I think that when you are close to them and in touch with them then, ultimately, my time spent outside of working is that. That’s the focus for me.

TeenHollywood: Bess was not only was a close confidante of Elizabeth but, in the film, someone she could be friends with, yet keep some distance. How did you work on that relationship?

Abbie: For me there was always a sense that Bess is very good at what she does to be in that position. But I always felt like the true Bess protected herself. I always felt that her inner child was kept underneath the corset. And there were many dreams and thoughts that she had which I don’t think she freely expresses to the Queen. The Queen has a sense of them because she is human. There was a separation. Bess’s involvement with the Queen was first and foremost work, and second of all compassion and love. But there’s only a certain extent that you can give over to that love and compassion when, at the end of the day, they can behead you or send you off into the outer world, which at that point in time was a completely different life. So I think there was an attachment but also a sense of self.

TeenHollywood: Yeah. Hard to be BFFs with a woman who can have you killed! It did look like you and Cate were having fun in your scenes. When you met, did you two hit it off?

Abbie: Cate’s an incredible woman and an incredible actress first of all. There was a very comfortable feeling from me towards Cate, both professionally and personally. She’s very focused and I felt that she had this tremendous amount of work to do in relation to her own character and her own performance. She was always aware of everyone else around her and particularly for me, I felt there was a watchful eye over my character, over scenes and the dialogue and it was nice to have that there.

TeenHollywood: You were in two Aussie films Somersault and Candy, now this and coming out Stop Loss. Has it been a whirlwind? Can you talk a bit about those films?

Abbie: Stop Loss [out next year] I filmed in Texas at the end of last year, actually straight off the back of The Golden Age which was an interesting change. I literally made that change within a week. It was interesting to do a contemporary piece, a very Texan sort of country girl dealing with this war we have going on and our involvement, whether it be direct or indirect, with that war. As soon as I read the script, I knew I had to do that [film]. September 11 was a big event for me. In my generation, this is the biggest world wide war that we’ve seen.

TeenHollywood: When you first started out in Somersault, did you see it as a stepping stone to a big career?

Abbie: No not at all. I had no idea. When went into Somersault, meaning the rehearsals and the shoot, I really felt like I stepped into this strange little creative bubble. That’s as hard as I’ve really worked on a film and as focused as I’ve ever been. At that time, I was really completely within it. I was actually really surprised when I got the phone calls about the [various] awards and phone calls about [film] festivals. It was from the outside. And I never though of that stuff, no.

TeenHollywood: What are you doing next?

Abbie: I’m doing a film called Bright Star with [director] Jane Campion next year. I play Fanny Brawne who is, in a sense I guess, really [Keats'] life love. But they were never allowed to marry. He died really young, he was 25. And her parents wouldn’t let him marry her because he was broke, you know; a poet. Keats is played by Ben Wishaw.

Source: Teen Hollywood

“For me there was always a sense that Bess is very good at which she does,” said Cornish. “Obviously, to be in that position. I always felt like the true Bess, she protected herself. I always felt that her inner child was kept underneath the corset. There were many dreams and thoughts that she had which I don’t think she freely expresses to the Queen. The Queen has a sense of them because she herself is human, but Bess maintains constantly around a Queen and so I guess for me there was a separation. Bess’s involvement with the Queen was first and foremost work, and second of all compassion and love. But there’s only a certain extent that you can give over to that love and compassion to someone else when ultimately at the end of the day they can behead you or send you off into the outer world, which at that point in time was a completely different life. So I think there was an attachment but also a sense of self.”

Throughout the film, in good times and bad, Cornish and Blanchett enjoy a sharp banter in both political and personal matters. “Cate’s an incredible woman and an incredible actress first of all. She’s very focussed in what she does and I felt in working with her that she had this tremendous amount of work to do in relation to her own character and her own performance. She was always aware of everyone else around her and particularly for me, I felt there was a watchful eye over my character, over scenes and the dialogue and it was nice to have that there. So there was a very comfortable feeling from me towards Cate, both professionally and personally. And I think [director] Shekhar [Kapur] just did such an amazing job in expressing his thoughts on that relationship and encouraging exploration of that relationship because it’s so intricate and difficult. You can’t sum it up in one sentence, you really can’t. And so to have the ability to do that with people like Cate and Shekhar was just a pleasure.”

Bess was a real historical figure, so Cornish did her homework. “I really wanted to know about the real Bess. I felt that it was very important to create some sense of connection to her and to life and it’s difficult because not an extensive amount is written about Bess but I gathered the bits that I could. We had an historian on board, and just questioning him about little things. About how do I stand when she walks in? Does she kneel? How far down does she bow? And all these little things I guess. But the most interesting thing, and the most creative insight for me into Bess came in a portrait. I found this portrait of her in a book which just pushed through the image and went straight through me. It’s difficult because there’s no real photographs of a person around that time so you have to rely on an artist’s interpretation. But there was something I felt was coming through this portrait and so I got it blown up really big. These people put it in my trailer and so I would see her when I came in, when I left, and I would check in with her.”

The portrait may not have resembled Cornish, but it inspired her work. “Bess didn’t have blue eyes in the film, but [the portrait showed] these very blue, very open, almost ocean-like eyes. There was this slight smile on her face but the lips were pursed so here was a happiness and contentment, a sort of a givingness to the moment but a constriction and that was the profession I felt coming in. Then the open eyes and stuff and the dream, there was something about her that was dreaming of something outside of that moment. That I felt affected me.”

Elizabeth: The Golden Age opens to theaters on October 12th.

Source: CanMag.com

Now that Elizabeth: The Golden Age has been released in some parts, reviews are pouring in. Unfortunately from what I have come across, the reviews seem to be quite bad, granted not as bad as one could imagine, but still it seems the second coming of Queen Elizabeth didn’t quite live up to expecations. :/ Hear are some of the less harsher ones, and I have scanned the two page review in the October 19th issue of Entertainment Weekly, view those here.

From – Entertainment Weekly
In the midst of all this 1980s-style Masterpiece Theatreism, meanwhile, one young performer sticks out as a reminder that Elizabeth: The Golden Age is, after all, a picture also made with a concern for today’s younger tastes in self-actualization. As her majesty’s royal favorite, Bess, Cornish (soon to appear in Stop Loss opposite Ryan Phillippe) comes across at every moment as a modern girl testing her girl power. Peach-toned and Australian like Blanchett, and poised in E2 for larger future fame the way Blanchett was in E1, the 25-year-old Cornish is a star with Now appeal synthesized into a production no longer sure what it wants to say about Then.

From – Roger Ebert
Elizabeth: The Golden Age is weighed down by its splendor. There are scenes where the costumes are so sumptuous, the sets so vast, the music so insistent, that we lose sight of the humans behind the dazzle of the production. Unlike Elizabeth (1998) by the same director, Shekhar Kapur, this film rides low in the water, its cargo of opulence too much to carry.

From – ReelViews
Clive Owen is suitably dashing and Abbie Cornish is adorable, but neither draws the camera’s attention with regularity. Although the performances are all workmanlike, they are unlikely to garner much notice when it comes time for Oscar nominations to be announced. (Blanchett may well be nominated, but her chances are better as Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There than as the Queen in Elizabeth.)

From – E! Online
All work and no play make Elizabeth a dull girl: The scenes between her and Owen have true heat, and they allow Blanchett to reveal the vulnerability beneath the power.

From – Variety
Cornish is perfectly comely as the court hottie; while Morton has a terrific moment when, after nervously awaiting news of Elizabeth’s assassination, her hopeful expectations turn to emotional obliteration upon learning her cousin has survived and she herself is now under arrest for treason — you can feel the breath of life go right out of her.

From – CompuServe
Some scenes stand out in the mostly ho-hum, academic-like movie, principally the queen’s patronizing dismissal of suitors such as the much young Austrian Archduke–whom she saves from his halting English by speaking to him in fluent German. With Geoffrey Rush practically wasted in the role of the queen’s chief adviser, the production, filmed in England, Scotland, and London’s Shepperton studios, is several steps behind director Kapur’s original Elizabeth.

I just got back from seeing the film myself and I found it absolutely fantastic. The costumes, sets and performances were spectacular. Miss Cornish is lovely in her role of Bess and her beauty is so enchanting. Her and Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth had wonderful chemistry and they really lit up the screen, I’d love to see them work together again. Be sure to go see it!

In The Golden Age, Cornish plays Bess Throckmorton, Queen Elizabeth’s first lady-in-waiting, who has an affair with Clive Owen’s Sir Walter Raleigh, much to the ire of the queen who also had her eye on the dashing adventurer, and when ComingSoon.net spoke to the young actress recently, we were pleasantly surprised by her eloquent responses to our questions.

ComingSoon.net: I just got off the phone with Geoffrey, your co-star and countryman who you worked with in “Candy,” so how was it working with him on this kind of thing?
Abbie Cornish: It was different, and the relationship of the characters and the time frame of the film and everything was completely different. It was kind of interesting for me, because I walked into a film that, even though a lot of time has passed since the last film, essentially a lot of the cast and crew were the same. It was funny because there was an establishment of some of these characters and their pasts and stories, and Walsingham in the first “Elizabeth” was such a presence. I remember he was so scary and dark, even though he was very loyal and there was a warmth to him, you knew that he was not the person that you wanted to have searching after you. It was interesting to already have a knowledge of characters and a film behind me, but being a newcomer into it.

CS: How was it being the newcomer? Was it hard coming into the bonds that had already been formed between Shekhar, Cate, Geoffrey and the crew as this new and very prominent character?
Cornish: No, it wasn’t hard. It was just interesting. It was nice to have those insights. I felt like I had little to no knowledge of that world in regards to historical facts and also Bess’ life. Obviously I had to research as much as I could and ask a lot of questions. There was already an energy to the film. Shekhar had already created something, so there was a basis to work from, and it was kind of fun like that I think.

CS: Bess is such a close confidante and friend of the Queen. Do you have any insight on how and why she went behind her back and had a relationship with Sir Walter? She obviously must have known that the Queen was interested in him.
Cornish: Yeah, I think Bess definitely has the sense that the Queen likes this guy, and I think everyone likes this guy, to tell you the truth. I don’t think it’s abnormal for her to have similar feelings ’cause I think all the other ladies in waiting probably thought, “Wow, who’s this adventurous, dashing young man.” Even the Queen’s taken by this guy, but I think what happens is that things get incredibly confusing. I mean, she’s told that he only likes her because she has the ear of the Queen. She is told to send messages back and forth basically, so she becomes the physical representation of the Queen’s message or Raleigh’s messages. Her and Raleigh get close through being forced to spend time together in a sense, and I think what happens is when the kiss that happens just outside of Bess’ chapel where she’s praying at. In Bess’ eyes, I feel that there’s a sense of what’s happening, that “this is wrong, but this is probably the most alive I’ve ever felt.” Bess’ journey is very much one of someone who is very good at what she does and very spirited and very light, but underneath, has this sadness to her. There’s this want for something that she can’t get within the court, that there’s this need for love, need for life. There is this almost dream-like quality of something much more emotional and spiritual. I think Sir Walter Raleigh evokes that within her, and she can’t deny that. I think after that first kiss, her mind starts going crazy, and I think she falls in love and she decides to choose love over work really.

CS: Now, Bess was based on a real person, she was a real person or was she fictionalized from different people in Queen Elizabeth’s court? Did you ever find that out?
Cornish: Yeah, she’s real. She’s a real person. She actually was first lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and she did have a relationship with Sir Walter Raleigh, which got her banished from the court, and also they had a child who died at six months, they then went on to have one or two children, and then Walter Raleigh was killed, and she went on to defend his person and honored him till her own death. Very strong woman and very much driven by spirit, you know?

CS: It sounds like they have to do a spin-off movie about Bess and her life. Do you think your character would return if they did the third movie they’ve been talking about and would you be interested in doing more of this kind of thing?
Cornish: Oh, of course. I don’t know if they would. I think in the next film, which would then be the later stage in Elizabeth’s reign and her life, my feeling is that historically, Bess would be out of the court by then, so the films are so concentrated in that court world, that I don’t know if they’d go outside of it. That’s a question for Shekhar I guess.

CS: In just a few movies, you’ve worked with some of England and Australia’s finest actors. Are you able to take something away from each of those experiences? Especially working with Cate, since so many of your other movies have been male-driven in some ways.
Cornish: Yeah, I mean it’s always interesting working with different people. I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of Australians overseas, so it’s a very comfortable, very homey feeling. I think you take things away from the entire experience of making that film. It’s not compartmentalized, and for me, making “The Golden Age” was a journey of exploration into that whole world and what that world could be like, and taking risks. I really felt like Shekhar encouraged me to take risks, and he challenged me. He kind of gave me this infinite world to dive into and create within, so you kind of take the whole experience away, if that makes sense.

CS: For a while, you were rumored to be the next James Bond girl, so how do you feel when you hear things like that which I assume must happen with every young actress eventually? Did you hear those rumors?
Cornish: Yeah, I was told about it, but it’s not true. You just dismiss it. It didn’t come from me.

CS: But once you heard about it, did it become something you might be interested or did you try to find out more about whether to go after it?
Cornish: No, I mean it essentially was just a rumor so you just let that go. I didn’t really think of it like that, no.

CS: Your next movie coming up is “Stop Loss” by Kimberly Peirce, director of “Boys Don’t Cry,” her first movie in a while. That must be very different thing. You’re playing an American in that?
Cornish: Yeah, I play a Texan girl who’s around 24-years-old and her fiance comes back from the war in Iraq, and the dynamics of their relationship and everyone around them gets really messed-up, I guess.

CS: What was that experience like? Very different from the last few movies you’ve done I’d imagine, being more American?
Cornish: Yeah, I think everything’s always different. I like to be open about each individual project. That was very much an ensemble cast and a great cast, like we all had so much fun together. Working with a bunch of people when everything’s really shared in the way that it was in that film. It’s a really great experience. That was very much teamwork making that film. It all felt like we were all leaning on each other’s shoulders, so it was a good one.

CS: You just got signed to do “Last Battle Dreamer” which is also with Ryan Phillipe (who’s in “Stop Loss”). How did you both end up working on two movies in a row together?
Cornish: Yeah, I really loved the film. Menno Meyjes is really interesting, really intellectually, and seems extremely aware. I’m kind of excited to do a film that is very dream-like. There’s fighting and wolves and Vikings and all of this sort of thing and you really feel like your imagination goes wild. Your imagination just never leaves. You’re born with it, you die with it, and I’ve wanted to do something that’s really sparked that part of my thinking in a while, and this one is that one, so I’m pretty excited about that one. I start it at the end of November.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age opens nationwide on Friday, October 12. Also check out our exclusive interview with Geoffrey Rush.

Source: Coming Soon

GALLERY LINKS:
- The Golden Age: Production Stills
- The Golden Age: On the Set