"Hi, I'm Abbie," she says, cool as Kind of Blue, her sunglasses nearly as large and dark as the baby grand behind her. It's breakfast hour in Beverly Hills, and the actress Abbie Cornish—26 and Australian, bright and bohemian, definitely a rising star and certainly not a starlet—has made herself at home on a piano bench. Growing up on a working farm, Cornish strove not so much to tickle the ivories as make them pay, and raised a regular fuss with her four siblings: "We used to jam on hand drums and didgeridoos and sourcepins"—pardon me, saucepans—the accent's as thick as it is charming. "And we had the piano in the house, and 'cause we lived out in the open, it didn't matter how much noise we made."
Cornish's self-sufficiency makes her a pure product of the arid tracts of Oz, and it can't have hurt her on-screen chemistry with countrymen Russell Crowe (A Good Year, her Hollywood debut) and Heath Ledger (Candy, a tale of married junkies that wails like an Edward Albee drama). Her latest compatriot-cum-coworker is Cate Blanchett, who reprises her Oscar-nominated turn as the Virgin Queen in this fall's Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Cornish plays the queen's closest attendant, Elizabeth Throckmorton, who jeopardizes her station by rushing into the arms of Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen). "Bess was the first lady-in-waiting," Cornish says, "but something within her had a sense of love and life beyond the court. It felt to me that Bess was just like the ocean." She clarifies with the terms "fluidity," "romance," and—the actress herself fairly glows with this next one—"a dreamlike quality." It will surprise no one who has met this free spirit to hear that she wasn't fond of her character's corset.
Strolling out to the terrace, Cornish pulls off her shades, her amber eyes ablaze as she recalls her native Hunter Valley, an undulating stretch of country outside Sydney: "So much of who I am came from the land and the animals I was around." Cows and ducks and everything? "And horses and turkeys and ferrets. We had a baby kangaroo once. They're just like a dog. We named it K.C.—for Kangaroo Cornish." At 16 she taught herself guitar, and she's still slaving away. (Last night, listening to an Eric Clapton instrumental, she had her mind blown anew, and this morning she sports chipped black polish on three fingers—nail protection for her strumming hand.) Then there's the Melbourne-based band that finds her working the microphone. "It's a hip-hop crew," she says. "Four guys and myself. Everyone's Australian, and the D.J. is just through the roof. If it's cool with you, I won't say the name. It's kinda cool to keep it for the people who come to see the music."
Spoken like a woman acquainted with the ruder facets of fame. Tabloid addicts will recognize Cornish from last year's reports that she grew very close with Ryan Phillippe while they were working on the upcoming drama Stop Loss (he was still married to Reese Witherspoon). Cornish won't say anything about that either, but the widespread rumor that she's been tapped as the next Bond girl gets her talking. "I don't know how that stuff starts," she says, fizzing with laughs. "I haven't had a meeting or anything!" Though Cornish has a weakness (imagine that) for Sean Connery's old Double-O, her dearest movie memories are small-screen oddities. "I loved the strange European films that came on at two in the morning," she confesses. It was therefore a divine shock when a 15-year-old Cornish—who'd signed on with an agent because modeling looked like fun—landed a one-episode TV drama spot. "I played a quadriplegic, and I would zoom around in this wheelchair and find all these new things. I rang my mum and said, 'Do you think maybe this is something I can keep doing?' " She kept doing it and—to quote another from the ranks of actor-rappers—doing it and doing it well.
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