Passion burns Bright

“I never trained as an actor and I feel I’m always learning about myself as an actor, because each film is different and you bring what you know and adapt,” says Australia-born Abbie Cornish. Filming Bright Star for writer-director Jane Campion, Cornish says she learned to enjoy rehearsals. “There were three weeks of them, but I think Jane would have done it for three more months if she could.”

As Fanny Brawne, the fiercely independent acquaintance of John Keats who falls into an intense romance with the poet, Cornish researched furiously before the nine-week shoot started in the UK in early 2008. She read Keats’ poems and letters of course, and learned to sew. But when she immersed herself in Brawne’s journal, the story of ill-fated young love got its hooks into her.

“[Fanny] had a day-to-day journal and the way she wrote was like perfection. The fact she must have been so messed up at the time makes it incredible,” says Cornish, referring to Brawne’s awareness that her cherished Keats was dying and they were living on borrowed time. “It was so painful to look at it because of how controlled it was.”

Cornish and Campion agreed that Brawne “was breaking rules left, right and centre”, so it was only fitting that Cornish, who, Campion has noted, is something of a rebellious soul herself, be given the space to find the character. “Jane did such a great job of not being tied to the period but at the same time being respectful of it. Jane sets up space for you on the shoot and creates a very intimate feeling.”

Cornish worked with dialect coach Gerry Grennell to fine tune that flawless English accent and “find where Fanny’s voice sat in her body so that when I spoke it sounded natural”.

She says: “There was so much preparation for Bright Star and I had read so much for it that [when we started shooting] I was ready to go.”

Jeremy Kay