SYDNEY (AP) — The actress at the center of Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush's defamation trial has told a Sydney court 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.

Norvill made her first public allegations against Rush during her testimony 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 across the side of her breast.