The Cupid’s-bow lips, the downy-soft cheeks, the button nose: 27-year-old Abbie Cornish has those Ivory-soap-girl features we’re so familiar with, and yet hers is a face it’s hard to stop staring at—testament to the intelligence, vulnerability, and sensuality she brings to her characters. Her breakthrough for American audiences came with fellow Australian Heath Ledger, as a junkie in 2006’s Candy, free-falling from invincible heroin highs to soul-seizing anguish. Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss saw her fleeing the law with Ryan Phillippe’s character. (Enter some real-life drama: Phillippe, then the husband of Reese Witherspoon, would soon become her boyfriend.) She may have been her loveliest in Jane Campion’s Bright Star, playing John Keats’s muse, the flirty and forthright Fanny Brawne.

Cornish jumped on the phone earlier today to discuss Bright Star, but it was her enthusiasm for Punch which was most apparent. Shooting began in Vancouver last month and Cornish says Snyder’s latest is “seriously, six films in one almost.”

An original story by Snyder and Steve Shibuya, Sucker centers on Baby Doll (Emily Browning), a young girl trying to escape a fate of being lobotomized by her evil stepfather. In order to do so, she believes she has to steal five objects before she is caught by a vile man. With only five days until the operation she descends into different imaginary worlds searching for the objects and recruits some of her institutionalized friends to help. Sweetpea is one of those buddies and Cornish says you have to imagine her character like a cube, each with a different side in every dimension.

“In these different worlds you’re constantly turning it and different parts of this character [appear],” Cornish says. “I have had a field day not only play the girl in the psych ward, but the girl in crazy action sequences killing 20 guys in row. Every day is different on this film.”

I’d spoken to another “Sucker” lady, Vanessa Hudgens, before shooting began and the actress was visibly pumped up about her own character’s massive gun. It turns out her co-stars are in awe of the weapon as well.

“Vanessa definitely has the biggest gun. It’s called ‘the saw’ and one day Jena Malone and I fired that gun off for fun, just for therapy,” Cornish says. “It has this blast of light that is so intense. I can see why she’s so fascinated.”

Cornish’s Sweetpea is no slouch, however. The actress notes, “I have a good shot gun, a knife and a broad four.”

Moreover, Sucker Punch is a completely different animal than Bright Star, but it’s the period drama that may put Cornish in a whole new stratosphere.

Already one of the better-reviewed films of the year, “Bright” finds Cornish portraying Frances “Fanny” Brawne, the true love of legendary British poet John Keats (played by Ben Whishaw). The film depicts their unconventional romance that was cut short by Keats’ untimely death at the age of 25. Bright Star is actually the name of one of his most famous poems that professes his love for Brawne. Cornish said that while the letters that documented their affair were helpful the biggest assist came from Keats’ poems themselves.

Cornish says, “Just to read Bright Star again helped so much to understand their relationship and the trials and tribulations.”

Both leads received strong notices for their work, but it’s Cornish’s performance that has garnered the most attention. But even while Cornish may be a major player for year-end awards, she insists she couldn’t have done it without Whishaw’s support.

“Sometimes as an actor your job is made a whole lot easer by being alongside an actor that you admire and respect,” Cornish says. “I absolutely love Ben. I think he’s just a gorgeous human being. To be able to work that way — really makes it a much more pleasant and, I guess, easy experience to go through. It’s not just two people going to work doing their job.”

As the weeks go by, however, Cornish is slowly joining a select group of candidates for the best actress Oscar. That can be daunting for anyone, but Cornish honestly sounds perplexed regarding the increasing buzz.

“I think I am still figuring out how I feel about the whole thing,” Cornish says. “I definitely am so excited that the film is being received the way that it is. Really, it’s a great honor for me for people to say the things they are saying. Bright Star was a very passionate experience. We all put a lot of ourselves in that film and it meant so much to us and it still means so much to us.”

Cornish adds, “I have never been through this experience before, it’s all so new to me.”

Unless some surprise contenders appear on the scene, Cornish will be an old pro by the time Oscar comes around.

Bright Star is now playing in select cities across the country.

Source: Hitflix

As the maligned and socially imprisoned Brawne, Cornish gives one of those ferocious performances that audiences love to cheer. Her Brawne is a strong, witty and determined proto-feminist, a steel buttercup who only looks like a delicate confection made from milk, butter, and spider-web icing.

If she has the energy, Abbie Cornish really ought to give herself a good pat on the back.

Actresses have told me that working with a female director is different than working with a male director. You’ve worked with a handful of women, and just finished working with a female director. So, does it make a difference?

Uhh … in some ways yeah, but the difference is not so striking that I could just compartmentalize all the male directors and all the female directors that I’ve worked with into their own boxes. I mean, I definitely know working with Cate Shortland on Somersault , my first film, was amazing. We talked to each other a lot in rehearsals, really full on, and we did a lot of hashing out of the script and scenes and characters – so when we went to shoot, we hardly spoke! We just did it.

Was it the same with Jane Campion ?

No, Jane likes to keep a constant dialogue. And things change and shift when you’re on set, and in the clothes. But, I just, I don’t know … I think with female directors there’s more emotional sensitivity attached to the process of making the film and talking with actors. But the investment in the project and the story is similar. I worked with Shekhar Kapur in Elizabeth: The Golden Age , and he’s incredible. He’s a very sensitive guy, very aware, and very switched on – kind of a little bit similar to Jane, in just how connected they are. They are both extremely visual, very smart directors with a lot of wisdom behind them.

Bright Star is set circa 1819. Did you have to learn to carry yourself and speak in a way that matched the era?

I did, but it surprisingly came quite naturally. You know, I think when you’re in those clothes that already makes you go like this [sits bolt upright, as if in a binding dress]. It definitely changes things. And I read as much as I could, as much as I could find, and I did a lot of work on the dialect as well, I had this really great dialect coach, and we did intensive work. All that definitely helps, but at the end of the day, once I found her voice, that was the best – I could just switch in and out of her [Brawne], and she seemed complete then, because I couldn’t do Fanny Brawne with my Australian accent! Ha! It doesn’t work at all!

This is a film about poetry – how it is created and how it affects people. And while audiences seem to love it, nobody reads poetry any more .

I’ve always been interested in poetry. I remember in school I used to love when we would do poetry. We would talk about what the poet was trying to say, the rhythms, the structure of the poem, and finding the tempo. I used to love it, like, front row.

Excuse the flattery, but you are very beautiful in this film (and in person). What’s it like to be filmed as if you’re an objet d’art?

It’s funny that you say that, I haven’t really thought that at all … I don’t know, I mean … yeah, I dunno. I’ve never felt that, didn’t feel that.

I’m assuming you’ve seen the film?

Ha! Yeah, I have seen it, but I guess I just see that as all Jane’s work. She’s filmed everything so well. Also, that’s not how I look at things, do I look good or not – I was just so into the film. When I saw it in Cannes, I really was watching the movie, I wasn’t watching myself.

Films about artists rarely get it right, because they never show the actual working lives of artists. In this film, your character is a clothing designer, and we see her making everything by hand. Did you have a sewing coach?

I did have to learn how to sew, but it was fun, because I like sewing anyway, and I already knew how to sew, um, a little bit. Ha! But learning the proper way, how to hem things, different stitches, how to embroider. The only thing was, it was really time consuming. I had this one piece of embroidery I was working on, it was just freestyle flowers and vines, but it just took me forever and ever! I’d sit at home and kind of get into it for about 45 minutes, and then I’d be like, “Okay, I’m done with that!”

Are you tired of being told how much you resemble the young Nicole Kidman?

It happens to me a lot! Especially when I do interviews.

Well, sorry. But it’s not like we’re all saying ‘You remind us of Jack Klugman.’

Ha! I don’t know what the comparisons are – physical, or because we’ve both worked with Jane? But I don’t really mind. I don’t mind at all. It’s flattering, and, ultimately, it’s only someone else’s opinion.

Source: Globe & Mail

Ask a question of Abbie Cornish and before she answers, she puts her head in her hands and practically stares through the table.

All those pauses – not to mention Cornish’s sharp features and long, blonde hair – can remind you of Nicole Kidman, who also doesn’t serve up easy answers to an interviewer. They’re both Australian, but at 27, Cornish is more than a decade younger. They both have been tabloid magnets – Kidman for all the reasons you know, Cornish as the gossiped-about girlfriend of Ryan Phillippe, ex-husband of Reese Witherspoon.

On screen, however, the resemblance disappears. Cornish seems only like herself, an intense actor with vast capacities for radiance and volatility.

She’s made smart professional choices with supporting parts in smallish films. In A Good Year (2006) she was the backpacking wine-lover who surprises Russell Crowe in Provence. The following year, she was the lady-in-waiting who incurred Cate Blanchett’s wrath by seducing Clive Owen in Elizabeth: The Golden Age.’

Now Bright Star, which opens Friday, puts her at the center of a movie and under the tutelage of no less than Jane Campion, who directed Holly Hunter to an Oscar in The Piano.

Set in the early 19th century, it’s a period romance starring Cornish as Fanny Brawne, an outspoken fan of John Keats’s poetry. She befriends Keats (Ben Whishaw) and falls madly in love with him. But his poverty keeps them from being married, and he dies at 25 of tuberculosis.

Brawne is independent-minded and able to articulate why a piece of writing is beautiful or flawed. She’s also a talented fashion designer, sewing her own clothes – elaborate, flamboyant garments with detailed flourishes. The idea, in part, is that this woman’s sewing is as valid a form of self-expression as Keats’s poetry.

Campion said that working with Cornish and Whishaw was different from older actors she’s worked with. “They don’t talk much, which I’m not used to. They have it all figured out, Abbie and Ben.’’

You mean they think they do? “No, they really do. They’re terribly smart and very instinctive creatures.’’

The director mentioned that Cornish bristled with an energy she’d never quite experienced in an actor before. “She’s like a little racehorse,’’ Campion said, laughing. “She jiggles on the side of the camera. According to her, she can’t wait to get going once she hears that camera whirring. And it’s like that in-the-moment buzz. Some people climb mountains to get that feeling. She performs.’’

Cornish came to the Toronto International Film Festival for the North American premiere of Bright Star. She had just started production on Sucker Punch, an all-woman action-fantasy with Vanessa Hudgens and Jena Malone, directed by Zack Snyder, who made 300 and The Watchmen.

Campion’s description of Cornish’s preparation cracked the actress up. “I’m definitely there ready to go,’’ she said.

But there’s also a practical reason for her energy. “I don’t see the point in dillydallying around,’’ she said. “If they need you on set, then you’re on set. As soon as action is called and the camera’s rolling, that’s the moment.’’

That vigor courses quietly through Cornish’s Bright Star performance. The chance to make a character feel completely alive in a costume drama excited her. “Fanny had a lot of gusto,’’ she said. “I could feel that. And Jane wanting to emphasize that made it, in some ways, easier for me to play. [Fanny] wouldn’t be helpless. She’d be vulnerable, sure, but strong.’’

The Snyder movie appealed to Cornish as a chance to do “something really physical, something I could train for, where I had to learn special skills.

“After Bright Star, my skin was translucent, I was so pale.’’ Cornish said. “I felt unfit and unhealthy. And as a bounce-back, I thought it’d be fun to do something where I’m training throughout the whole movie.’’ So that would explain the intimidating tone of her arms.

She doesn’t like to work for working’s sake. She has other areas of her life to maintain. “When I’m not making movies, I’m painting, making music, being with family and friends, which is more important to me than my career,.’’ she said. Cornish plays guitar and piano, makes hip-hop beats, and raps. That shouldn’t be surprising. And yet when the woman sitting across from you, wearing a black lace Vera Wang evening gown and a black cocktail jacket (to fend off the hotel’s chill) says, “I do some rapping,’’ your eyebrow can’t help itself. It just arches.

“My plan is to record an album in the next couple of years. The bummer is that I don’t have enough time to do everything I want to do. But’’ – she lifted the tablecloth and knocked on wood – “I’ll be around long enough to have time to do it all.’’

The reason you root for Cornish to make the time is that Campion is right. She does seem to have herself figured out. It’s no fun hungering for adult movie stars and seeing only insecure starlets. No one wants Meryl Streep’s career. They want Demi Moore’s body.

Unlike, say, Megan Fox, Cornish doesn’t appear to have a naked need for approval. She acts because she’s good at it. She’s already given two impressive, emotionally grueling performances, one as a drug addict with Heath Ledger in Candy and another as a soldier’s girlfriend in Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss. If she wants to rap, she at least leaves you eager to hear what she’d say.

Source: The Boston Globe

The 19th century gentlewoman Fanny Brawne might have been lost to history were it not for her love affair with the great romantic poet John Keats. Most certainly, Brawne would have been lost to the Twitterati generation were it not for 27-year-old Abbie Cornish’s interpretation of her in Jane Campion’s Bright Star, which chronicles her attachment to Keats, who died of tuberculosis at 25. The film opens Friday.

“They seemed like two peas in a pod,” Cornish says of the couple. “The sense of humor, the sensitivity that was in her was also in him. That was a very rare thing to run into a man like that for her. She grew up in the country. She was just very enthralled by his zest and enthusiasm, and his appreciation of beauty and the smaller things.”

As portrayed by Cornish, Brawne is young in years but not in maturity, and is filled with unexpressed brio. From her first audition, Cornish brought unusual strength to the role, says Campion, who has created vivid female characters in such films as Sweetie, An Angel at My Table and the Oscar-winning The Piano.

“She was very different from the way others played the character. They were scared, a little wounded,” says Campion, explaining that Cornish played Brawne “mentally very healthy. A little young. A little bit of a fashionista, a little ridiculous. Then [Fanny] found her moral courage and strength. She falls in love. It was very winning. You look back on the audition tape and couldn’t watch it without falling in love with her.”

On a recent Saturday morning, Cornish showed up for tea at the Chateau Marmont, not far from her home in Los Angeles, where she’s lived for the last year. She wears a simple black structured sundress, her hair freshly washed, and radiates a kind of farm-fresh wholesomeness.

It turns out Cornish actually grew up on a 170-acre farm along with four siblings and a brood of animals, including a baby kangaroo that slept in a sling hung from her doorknob. “Casey Rooster was his name. It was like having a dog in kangaroo form. You could call him from across the paddock and he’d come bounding up and follow you around,” she says with a laugh.

She also seems possessed by a free-spirited, independent quality. This is a girl who stumbled into acting after winning a modeling contest as a teenager, worked in Australian TV, and then upon high school graduation, traveled alone through Europe and America.

“The only time I felt any sort of fear or realization of what I was doing was after my mum dropped me off at the airport,” she says. “My mum is so strong and she had tears in her eyes. As a child when you see tears in a mother’s eyes, it makes you think.”

“I think she shows an incredible amount of independence for someone so young,” Campion says. “Fanny is very similar to Abbie. She takes her own advice. She goes against the perceived wisdom of her friends.”

Cornish did return from her travels in one piece, and seized the attention of the Australian film industry with her first major role in 2004′s “Somersault.” In it, she plays Heidi, a sexually inquisitive teenager who runs away from home, a part imbued with an unexpected and heartbreaking curiosity.

Cornish serendipitously found her way into the character when she came across a huge concave metal semicircle — an art installation at a local gallery. As she walked toward it, she watched her various reflections in the metallic surface and felt the instinct to let out a little song — “Coo-ee,” which vibrated and echoed. “I was like, ‘This is so Heidi. She’d sit here and make weird noises and play with it.’ I then explored this art exploration as the character. It was such a huge key into her mind frame, and it just came from nowhere.

“Sometimes you have this puzzle” — a character — “and you force pieces in,” she explains. Other parts are “researched or are history, or what other people tell you. Sometimes, it’s just, ‘I don’t know.’ They shift and slide and when you’re open to it, it all seems to fall in place.”

For Fanny Brawne, Cornish went to the books, specifically Brawne’s letters to Keats’ sister, and her diary. “That was an incredible love for her. The pain of his death never went away.”

There was also, of course, Keats’ poetry — including the work that inspired the film’s title, which reads in part: “Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art” — and his letters to Brawne.

“You read them and it melts your heart and spurs your imagination,” says Cornish, though she adds, “you do as much research and experimentation as you can until you feel like that character is in your mind, your spirit, your skin and your body, and then you trust it and let it go. You let the moments be what they are.”

Source: LA Times

Most certainly, Brawne would have been lost to the Twitterati generation were it not for 27-year-old Abbie Cornish, who portrays Brawne in Jane Campion’s Bright Star, which opens Friday. It chronicles Brawne’s attachment to Keats, who died of tuberculosis at 25.

“They seemed like two peas in a pod,” Cornish said of the couple. “The sense of humor, the sensitivity that was in her was also in him. That was a very rare thing to run into a man like that for her. She grew up in the country. She was just very enthralled by his zest and enthusiasm, and his appreciation of beauty and the smaller things.”

As portrayed by Cornish, Brawne is young in years but not in maturity and is filled with unexpressed brio. From her first audition, Cornish brought unusual strength to the role, says Campion, who has created vivid female characters in such films as Sweetie, An Angel at My Table and the Oscar-winning The Piano.

“She was very different from the way others played the character. They were scared, a little wounded,” says Campion, explaining that Cornish played Brawne “mentally very healthy. Then (Fanny) found her moral courage and strength. She falls in love. It was very winning. You look back on the audition tape and couldn’t watch it without falling in love with her.”

“I think (Cornish) shows an incredible amount of independence for someone so young,” Campion said. “Fanny is very similar to Abbie. She takes her own advice. She goes against the perceived wisdom of her friends.”

Cornish grew up on a 170-acre Australian farm along with four siblings and a brood of animals, including a baby kangaroo that slept in a sling hung from her doorknob.

“Casey Rooster was his name,” she said. “It was like having a dog in kangaroo form. You could call him from across the paddock, and he’d come bounding up and follow you around.”

Cornish also seems possessed by a free-spirited, independent quality. This is a girl who stumbled into acting after winning a modeling contest as a teenager, worked in Australian TV and then upon high school graduation traveled alone through Europe and America.

“The only time I felt any sort of fear or realization of what I was doing was after my mom dropped me off at the airport,” she said. “My mom is so strong and she had tears in her eyes. As a child when you see tears in a mother’s eyes, it makes you think.”

Cornish did return from her travels in one piece and seized the attention of the Australian film industry with her first major role in 2004’s “Somersault.” In it, she played Heidi, a sexually inquisitive teenager who runs away from home.

To play Brawne, Cornish went to the books, specifically Brawne’s letters to Keats’ sister, and her diary.

“That was an incredible love for her,” Cornish said. “The pain of his death never went away.”

There was also, of course, Keats’ poetry — including the work that inspired the film’s title, which reads in part: “Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art” — and his letters to Brawne.

“You read them and it melts your heart and spurs your imagination,” Cornish said. “You do as much research and experimentation as you can until you feel like that character is in your mind, your spirit, your skin and your body, and then you trust it and let it go. You let the moments be what they are.”

Source: Kansas City Star

From: NY Times

The movie really belongs to Brawne, played with mesmerizing vitality and heart-stopping grace by Abbie Cornish.

Ms. Cornish, an Australian actress whose previous films include Stop-Loss, Candy and Somersault, has, at 27, achieved a mixture of unguardedness and self-control matched by few actresses of any age or nationality. She’s as good as Kate Winslet, which is about as good as it’s possible to be.

From: EW

But Campion’s big-sisterly encouragement of Cornish’s lovely, openhearted performance — and Whishaw’s well-matched response — results in a character instantly, intimately recognizable to anyone remembering her own first love.

From: Rolling Stone

And Cornish is glorious, making Fanny a force of womanhood able to take on Brown (Schneider is a sharply witty irritant) when he tries to break the connection between her and her beloved. Cornish catches the fertile mind that Fanny poignantly tries to nurture, knowing she’ll grow closer to Keats by deciphering the words that possess him.

From: Buzz Sugar
The force that really carries the movie is Abbie Cornish’s portrayal of Fanny Brawne; the film belongs to her and her emotional portrayal of the girl left behind. She makes you feel every stage of her involvement with Keats, from crush to infatuation to heartbreak when she fears she’s been forgotten — and finally, to devastation when she loses her beloved to death. It’s almost unbelievable that Brawne was supposed to have been seen as a silly girl only interested in fashion and flirting, because Cornish plays her so earnestly and with so much depth.

From: San Fransisco Chronicle

When Brawne (Abbie Cornish) first meets Keats in 1818, she’s unimpressed but flirts with him anyway. Cornish and Whishaw bring off a quiet but considerable feat: They portray monumental emotions with barely a glance or a brush of skin. And as the plot demands more melodrama, they dish out swooning erotic malaise.

First she steals your eyes, then she steals the movie. And not to be too graphic, she works her tail off.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: Esquire (2009)

She steps out into the brilliant blue light of a Malibu afternoon wearing flip-flops and a diaphanous little black sundress, a look suggestive of a young woman on holiday, a role she loves to play above all else, to hear her tell it. Like so many of her fellow Australians, her wanderlust seems almost genetic, an inbred need to see something more of the world, someplace else, as if to confirm its true existence. She leans against the railing and searches the horizon, the array of lean-muscled surfers in the middle distance, her honey-colored eyes behind green-tinted aviators, the breeze touching her golden, flyaway hair. She talks about soaking up sun in San Sebastián, on the Basque coast of Spain; of Morocco’s sensual dichotomy between light and dark; of living in an empty house in a village in Brazil with two male friends, sleeping in hammocks, studying the martial art capoeira. She drinks Asian “bubble tea” from a plastic cup, compliments of her publicist. There are tapioca pearls at the bottom; they rise in single file through an overlarge straw, her lips the naked pink of an ingenue.

At twenty-seven, Cornish is perhaps most widely known for contributing to the breakup of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe, with whom she costarred in (and from whom she stole the last third of) Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce’s Iraq war tale. One of five children raised on a 170-acre farm in the Hunter Valley region north of Sydney, the former Aussie TV star has been praised as an actress since the morning after her first public performance, at age fifteen, a guest turn as a paraplegic on the down-under series Children’s Hospital. Like generations of precocious actresses before her, she never looked back.

Often touted as the next Nicole Kidman or Naomi Watts, often described by directors and producers as “luminescent,” she is a naturalistic indie actress wrapped inside the skin of a sex kitten, Chloë Sevigny meets Scarlett Johansson. Playing Heidi in 2004′s Somersault, she is unnervingly convincing as a young runaway, trading her innocence for necessity and love. In Candy, as a heroin addict, she holds her own against a powerful performance some critics have called one of Heath Ledger’s finest. Even opposite fellow Aussie Cate Blanchett’s Oscar-nominated turn in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Cornish manages to steal your eyes at times. Playing Bess Throckmorton, the angelic lady-in-waiting who falls for the charms of Clive Owen’s lusty Sir Walter Raleigh, she is light and radiant against the dim gloom of the Virgin Queen’s castle.

Next for Cornish is Jane Campion’s latest, Bright Star. With her hair dyed brown, her charms swaddled in an entertaining assortment of oddly whimsical period costumes as befits her fashion-obsessed character, Cornish portrays Fanny Brawne, the eighteen-year-old muse to the young poet John Keats. While living next door to her family between 1819 and 1820, the ill-fated, tubercular Romantic master produced his most beautiful and enduring works, including “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”

Cornish has just flown in from Vancouver, where she has begun three months of training for her next movie, Sucker Punch. Cowritten and directed by Watchmen‘s Zack Snyder, the film costars Vanessa Hudgens and is listed as an adventure fantasy. After two period pieces, Cornish says she’d been hoping to do something physically demanding, something for which she had to train, “something really trippy like a concept film, where I’d have to really use my imagination and do crazy things.”

Now she’s busting her butt five days a week, five to six hours a day. “Mixed martial arts, fighting, swords, weapons, choreography, personal trainers,” she enumerates proudly, the beguiling accent of a proper sheila. “We add gun stuff at the end of the day.”

Moving a bit stiffly, she takes a seat at a patio table, in the shade beneath an umbrella. There are bruises visible up and down her (luminous) arms and legs. She reaches again for her Moroccan-mint-blended green-tea boba, from a little café she loves. When she arrived at the interview, she’d found it waiting. “It was funny to want to do that kind of movie and then it just comes along,” she says brightly, and then she takes a lingering sip. The beads of tapioca flow in single file. It makes her smile.

Source: Esquire

On Friday night the 26-year-old looked every bit the movie star as she stepped onto the red carpet for the opening of the world’s most prestigious film festival, on the French Riviera.

Wearing a lavender gown by Australian designer Toni Maticevski, Cornish lived up to her promise as the leader of Australia’s next generation of film stars.

Standing alongside her co-stars and the director of Bright Star, Jane Campion, Cornish showed the confidence and poise of a future Oscar winner.

Cornish’s boyfriend, actor Ryan Phillippe, is believed to be with her, but he didn’t walk the red carpet on Friday night.

It was a very different story in 2001 when her first feature – low-budget Aussie flick The Monkey’s Mask – was being sold in the market section of the festival. Back then, Cornish paid her own way to Cannes.

“I remember being by myself at the airport, and thinking, ‘wow, the world is a wonderful, amazing place, but I’m going on this six-month journey through the Far East and Africa and Europe, and who knows if I’ll be dead or alive at the end of it’,” she said.

In 2004, she returned to the Riviera, this time as the star of Somersault, which screened in the Un Certain Regard competition. She was earmarked as one of the faces to watch.

Cornish made her acting start on ABC TV series Wildside, for which she won an Australian Film Institute Award in 1999.

She has since begun to make a name for herself in Hollywood with roles in films including Stop-Loss, Elizabeth: The Golden Age and A Good Year.

At the Bright Star premiere she was flanked by co-stars Ben Wishaw and Thomas Sangster.

At a photo call for the film earlier in the day, Cornish was radiant in a sleeveless white dress, by Chloe, with matching open toe heels.

Bright Star, an English period drama, is one of 20 movies vying for the top prize in the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or competition. It depicts the love affair between 19th century poet John Keats (Wishaw) – who died of tuberculosis in 1821 aged 25 – and his young neighbour, Fanny Brawne (Cornish).

“Cornish has the acting skill to match her striking beauty and she makes the small, loving gestures that the British might call soppy both real and touching,” wrote Hollywood Reporter reviewer Ray Bennett.

For Campion, 55, the premiere also marked a return to Cannes.

Campion is the only woman to win the Palme d’Or – for The Piano in 1993 – in the festival’s 62-year history. She used her time in the spotlight to highlight the lack of opportunities for female directors at the top level.

Campion said she admired the passion and dedication Cornish brought to the role of Brawne.

“I so loved what Abbie gave to the character,” she said.

Source: The Daily Telegraph

The 25-year-old star of local films such as Somersault and Candy was director Kimberly Peirce’s first choice to play a Texan soldier’s girlfriend because of her duality – being “one of the guys” and, at the same time, the woman they all fantasise about.

Peirce said that combination of qualities was impossible to find in American starlets vying for the role.

“When we were writing the character we knew we needed a Texan girl who, if you got a flat tyre on your truck she’d go change it, if you needed a gun shot she’d shoot it, and if you got in trouble and you needed to be bailed out, she’d do it,” Peirce said.

“She was one of the guys, and yet she was totally a woman. She was the one they would all fantasise about.

“You don’t find that in American actresses – I mean you really don’t – so she was my top choice.”

Peirce is in Sydney for the Australian premiere of Stop-Loss, which tells the story of a young American soldier (Phillippe) who is ordered to return to Iraq as part of the military’s controversial Stop-Loss policy, but opts instead to go AWOL.

Cornish and Phillippe’s romance reportedly blossomed on the set of the film, following the 33-year-old actor’s split from Reese Witherspoon.

Last week the couple appeared together at the Australians in Film 2008 Breakthrough Awards in Los Angeles, where Cornish accepted a gong for her Stop-Loss role.

Cornish was not able to join Peirce on the red carpet at tonight’s Sydney Film Festival premiere at the State Theatre as she’s filming overseas.

But Peirce was more than happy to sing the praises of her film’s leading lady.

“I just think she is extraordinarily beautiful and talented,” Peirce said of Cornish.

“Whether there were a tonne of people in the scene, or there was dialogue or no dialogue, she was the centre of attention.

“The other actors had to watch out because she’s so charismatic.”

Peirce revealed she was a big fan of Australian actors and filmmakers in general, naming Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana, Russell Crowe and director Peter Weir as some of her favourites.

“I have to ask, what are you guys doing that are making your actors so interesting and so full of life?” she said.

“I mean, something about the lifestyle here is making them more complicated, more interesting.

“There’s a kind of lived in quality.”

Stop-Loss opens nationally on August 14.

Source: LiveNews

The article states that she is set to begin filming Bright Star next month.

Maybe it’s that she’s fresh from the beach. Or it could be the homage-to-bohemia outfit: white lace top, military-style jacket, red rubber Wellies, and thumb ring. But at a diner in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz, as Cornish slouches against a wall and twists her wavy blond hair into a ponytail, she looks more like a lovely, disheveled wanderer (the kind every guy hopes to meet on his soul-searching trip to Europe) than a movie star who got a standing ovation at Cannes in 2004 for her first leading role… read more

Sometimes it’s hard to reconcile the public image of Abbie Cornish with her Aussie farm-girl origins.

Watching her, all regal and corsetted, as the queen’s handmaiden in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, or reading about her reported part in the break-up of Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon, it’s tempting to think of her as a femme fatale who might care more about which designer label she’ll be wearing on the red carpet than how we treat animals.

But the moment she begins talking in her unaffected Aussie twang about bonding with the livestock on her father’s farm, or the thrill she gets from helping school kids learn about animal-welfare issues, it’s clear that appearances can be deceptive.

View the complete Abbie article from today’s edition of The Daily Telegraph (Australia) here.

“I love to play music,” the Elizabeth: The Golden Age star told Insider.

Cornish spends her down time between films – not that there’s much of that these days – working on music at her family’s farm in the Hunter Valley.

Being able to hold a note will also come in handy when Cornish begins her next film, Last Battle Dreamer, alongside Ryan Phillippe.

“There’s a scene where we recite a poem to each other, and it’s half-singing and half- spoken – it’s very melodic,” she says.

Source: The Daily Telegraph

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.”

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

Abbie Cornish has given her strongest indication yet of a full-blown romance with Ryan Phillippe, who separated from his Oscar-winner wife Reese Witherspoon after working with Cornish.

Cornish, 25, who appeared at the Sydney premiere of Elizabeth: The Golden Age last night, has revealed her next film project is a love story starring opposite Phillippe.

“I’m doing Last Battle Dreamer which is a Viking film. It’s about Vikings who pillage and do what Vikings do,” she said. “A love story occurs between an Englishwoman and a Viking.”

Asked whether the role would prompt further speculation about her romance with Phillippe, Cornish said “I don’t know”. But she rebuffed any suggestion she might be worried about the rumours.

“I wouldn’t have done the film otherwise,” she said.

The actor has previously refused to comment about her relationship with Phillippe but after Witherspoon made a public appearance with her new partner Jake Gyllenhaal in the US last week the stance appears to have softened.

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