Alongside her equally glamorous co-stars, Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush, at tomorrow night’s premiere of Elizabeth: The Golden Age at the Cremorne Orpheum, it will be hard to imagine Abbie Cornish dressed down in her farm gear and gumboots.

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.

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.

Academy Awards heavyweights such as George Clooney and Cate Blanchett were no match for another of Tyler Perry’s populist tales.

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.

TeenHollywood chatted with Abbie about her roles in Elizabeth as well as past films and the upcoming Stop Loss and Bright Star in a recent interview which you can read below. Abbie talks about things from her favorite Bess costume, corsets, co-stars and more, definitely a great read for Abbie fans!

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.

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Elizabeth: The Golden Age is the story of Elizabeth I’s reign, but many other characters get a chance to shine. Clive Owen makes Sir Walter Raleigh his own, and Abbie Cornish stands out as the queen’s confidante, Bess. She serves the queen, but has her own personality.

“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.”