Actress accuses Geoffrey Rush of touching her breast

SYDNEY — The actress at the center of Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush’s defamation trial told a Sydney court on Tuesday that he deliberately touched the side of her breast in a Shakespearean stage scene in which her character lay dead on the ground.

Rush is suing the publisher of Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph newspaper in the Federal Court for defamation over articles published in November that accused the 67-year-old Australian actor of behaving inappropriately toward actress Eryn Jean Norvill during the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of “King Lear” in 2015 and 2016.

Rush denies the claims against him and argues the articles portrayed him as a pervert and a sexual predator.

Norvill never spoke to the newspaper before the articles were published and made her first public allegations against Rush during her testimony in court on Tuesday.

The 34-year-old actress testified that she was playing King Lear’s dead daughter Cordelia when Rush, playing the distraught father, stroked his hand across the side of her right breast and on to her hip during a preview performance.

She said it hadn’t happened before, with Rush usually touching her face and sometimes her head, shoulder and arm during the scene.

“It couldn’t have been an accident because it was slow and pressured,” she told the court.

During his testimony last week, Rush denied deliberately touching Norvill’s breast, touching her lower back under her shirt when they were backstage or making lewd gestures and comments toward her.

He became emotional when he said that in the scene where Norvill’s character died, he imagined she was his “own real-life daughter and she’d been hit by a bus on the street where we live.”

While rehearsing the scene with her eyes closed, Norvill told the court she felt shocked, belittled and embarrassed on realizing that Rush was making “groping” gestures over her body to the tittering laughter of a “complicit” rehearsal room.

Norvill, who said she had longed to work with Rush before the production, said his allegedly lewd gestures and sexual innuendo became normalized in rehearsals.”

“Everyone else didn’t seem to have a problem about it, … so I was looking at a room that was complicit; my director didn’t seem to have a problem with it.”