Abbie Cornish grew up as the second of five children on a 70-hectare rural property in Australia. At 13, she became a vegetarian and decided to give modeling a try, though she was planning to be a veterinarian one day. After reaching the finals of a magazine competition, she acquired a talent agent, and at 15, landed her first acting job on the TV series Children’s Hospital, playing a quadriplegic.
Cornish then became a regular on the crime drama series Wildside, winning a 1999 Young Actor’s Award from the Australian Film Institute. Meanwhile, her parents had divorced, so at 16, she moved to the nearby city of Newcastle, where she shared a warehouse apartment with an artist.
An avid traveler, Cornish spent her 18th birthday alone on a hill in northern Italy, writing in her journal and thinking. After trekking through Europe and the U.S. for six months, she ran out of money and returned to Australia to work.
Her film debut was in The Monkey’s Mask (2000), starring Kelly McGillis. Cornish landed a regular role on another Australian series, Outriders (2001), about a group of teenagers who ride horses. Her next motion picture was Horseplay (2003), a comedy about a horse trainer.
For her work as a runaway teenager in Somersault (2004), Cornish won several awards, including Best Actress awards from both the Australian Film Institute and the Film Critics Circle of Australia.
Her star kept rising as Heath Ledger’s heroin-addicted lover in Candy (2006) and as Russell Crowe’s long-lost American cousin in A Good Year (2006). Unfortunately, her first headlines in North America didn’t put her in a good light: she was named by various tabloids as having had an affair with Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon's husband, on the set of Stop Loss (2007), though this was denied by her publicist.
Hobbies include playing piano and guitar and dancing hip-hop.
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