Leonardo DiCaprio was Rimbaud, Julian Sands (and Michael Hutchence) played Shelley, Gwyneth Paltrow did Plath and John Hannah was Wordsworth, but for the most part, the movies have steered clear of the lives of the poets. Nobody sees box-office gold in Ode on a Grecian Urn. Nevertheless, Jane Campion found the backing to make Bright Star, the story of John Keats’s intense but unconsummated love affair with Fanny Brawne, which is almost certain to be among this year’s leading Oscar contenders. Rightly so: a vivid, sensual, thoroughly immersive and deeply moving romance, this is one of Campion’s best films, on a par with The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady and An Angel at My Table.

If Keats (played with passion and delicacy by Ben Whishaw) would seem to lay the greater claim on our attentions, it’s Abbie Cornish, as Fanny, who emerges as the film’s beating heart and soul. We may think of a writer’s muse as a passive object of adoration, but Bright Star reminds us that it takes two to make a love story. Through Fanny’s fresh and eager eyes, we are introduced to the sensitive, idealistic, dedicated young poet — 23 years old in 1818, and struggling to find the full measure of his art.

While Keats’s friend and colleague Charles Brown (played by Paul Schneider) jealously seeks to protect him from the untimely distraction offered by their flighty, fashionable neighbour, it’s the relatively unsophisticated Fanny who opens his heart and inspires his most beautiful romantic verse. What’s more, in contrast with the disappointingly conventional Brown, it is Fanny who ultimately matches Keats in her courage and devotion. “I found her very vibrant, strong and bold, but also sensitive and shy,” Cornish proffers, speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. “I admired her. It was really honourable, the way she cared for Keats and was ready to give everything for him.”

Any young actress would surely relish the chance to become one of Campion’s women, joining the cinematic sisterhood alongside Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin, Kerry Fox, Kate Winslet, Meg Ryan and Nicole Kidman. But Cornish says it was the screenplay — a solo effort by the director, inspired by Keats’s love poems and Andrew Motion’s biography — that had the greatest impact on her. “The script was beautifully written, it already had that flow and life to it. I felt that I had to do it,” she says. “I fell in love with Fanny and I was in tears at the end. It’s kind of rare that you read a film and it hits you that hard, strikes so many chords.”

Not that it was hers for the asking. Campion, who is from New Zealand, and her producer, Jan Chapman, who is Australian, initially looked for an English actress and a more established star. A two-hour audition, in which the movie’s 25-year-old composer, Mark Bradshaw, played Keats, convinced everyone involved that Cornish could make it work.

“Abbie was so alive, and delicious when she was being ridiculous,” Campion recalls approvingly.

Then there was the “Australian rebellious energy” that recommended her to Chapman. Motion describes an “unformed, frisky, quick-tongued” Fanny, “conventional in her tastes, vehement in her enjoyments”. Cornish gives us all that. As well, Campion notes, “she had the emotional capacity to handle the tragedy at the end”.

Even so, it was more than a year between the audition and the first day of shooting, and when Cornish talks about how she sensed from the off that this collaboration would be about the “honesty, integrity and passion of the work... not about how much this film is going to make at the box office”, there is surely a trace of gratitude in her assessment.

She has been on the cusp of stardom for some time now, working opposite Russell Crowe in A Good Year and Heath Ledger in Candy, but she’s not a box-office name anywhere outside Australia. In America, and here in Britain, too, probably, she’s best known, thanks to the gossip mags, as the woman who now lives with her Stop-Loss co-star Ryan Philippe, the former husband of Reese Witherspoon.

Unsurprisingly, that’s one subject she prefers not to discuss, and doubtless accounts for a certain wariness that hovers over our conversation. Cornish is impeccably polite and seems naturally expansive — her arms regularly shoot out in semaphore to illustrate her words, a physical tic accentuated by the sexy sleeveless dress she has chosen for the evening’s red-carpet hoopla — yet she is careful to keep herself reined in, too.

Neither the dress nor the restraint quite suits her personality — though she is certainly more glamorous than she appears wearing the flouncy Regency garb Fanny Brawne favours in Bright Star. Today, at any rate, she is simultaneously down to earth and minding her p’s and q’s.

The second of five children, she grew up on a farm in New South Wales, surrounded by animals (she has been vegetarian since she was 13), swimming in the local reservoir, making rafts, drawing, painting and taking photos, like her mum.

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