To call Abbie Cornish’s astute, china-delicate performance in “Bright Star” a “breakthrough,” as so many critics this year have done, is to do something of a disservice to her similarly remarkable work in a pair of underseen Australian titles.
No informed viewer should be taken off-guard by the tart questioning and quiet sensuality she brings to the role of Fanny Brawne, the teenaged lover of famed Romantic poet John Keats, in Jane Campion’s period biopic.
What’s surprising is that, after winning a bevy of Australian awards at the age of 22 for Cate Shortland’s 2004 coming-of-age drama “Somersault,” and following it up with a searing turn opposite the late Heath Ledger in Neil Armfield’s harrowing junkie romance “Candy,” it’s taken three years for another starring role to come her way.
In that time, Cornish dipped her toe into international waters with supporting roles in ill-fated vehicles like “A Good Year,” “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” and “Stop-Loss” – though if those lean years were troubling to the Next Big Thing monitors, they weren’t to Cornish, who had “Bright Star” on her radar all along.
“I was sent the script for the film about two-and-a-half years ago, and I fell in love then and there,” the 27 year-old actress tells me over the phone, gentle Australian twang very much intact. She’s in Los Angeles to pick up her younger sister, before returning to the Vancouver set of Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch.”