Eryn Jean Norvill says she felt shocked, belittled and embarrassed when she realised star actor Geoffrey Rush was making "groping" gestures over her body to the tittering laughter of a "complicit" rehearsal room.

The Oscar winner was bulging his eyes, licking his lips and smiling as he made the gestures toward her during a rehearsal for the Sydney Theatre Company's production of King Lear, Norvill has told the NSW Federal Court.

Norvill, who had longed to work with Rush before the production, alleged his lewd gestures and sexual innuendo became normalised in rehearsals but she didn't say anything as "his power was intimidating".

"Everyone else didn't seem to have a problem about it, you know, so I was looking at a room that was complicit; my director didn't seem to have a problem with it, so I felt quashed in terms of my ability to find allies," she said on Tuesday.

Norvill was speaking publicly for the first time about her allegations against Rush, with the 67-year-old actor suing Daily Telegraph publisher Nationwide News and journalist Jonathon Moran.

The Telegraph last year published an allegation Rush behaved inappropriately toward a co-star, later revealed to be Norvill, during a production of King Lear in 2015 and 2016.

Rush strongly denies the claims and argues the newspaper portrayed him as a pervert and sexual predator.

Norvill testified they had been rehearsing a scene in which her character Cordelia, the daughter of Rush's Lear, was dead when she opened her eyes at the sound of laughter and saw him making the groping gestures over her.

"I felt belittled and embarrassed and I guess shamed," she said.

It was during a preview performance of the scene she alleges Rush deliberately stroked across the side of her right breast and on to her hip as he delivered a monologue.

Norvill said it hadn't happened before, with Rush usually touching her face and sometimes her head, shoulder and arm.

"It couldn't have been an accident because it was slow and pressured," she said.

Several times while waiting to walk on stage, Rush would brush his fingers against hers and trace them on the palm of her hand.

The actor said once when he stroked her lower back, her "panic levels shot up" and she felt "unsafe and probably sad ... because I think Geoffrey's idea of friendship was different to mine".

Cross-examined by Rush's lawyer, Bruce McClintock SC, Norvill denied fabricating parts of her evidence.

She said she "100 per cent" disagreed her claim of sexual harassment by Rush was a "complete lie".

Mr McClintock also put it to Norvill that she'd made up an allegation about director Neil Armfield telling Rush his touching her during the death scene was becoming "creepy" and "unclear".

Armfield told the trial last week he had no memory of making the comment and denied using the word "creepy".

Mr McClintock questioned her over an exchange of nickname messages in 2014 when she referred to Rush as God of Generic Lust, Jersey Cream Filled Puff and Galapagos Lusty Thrust.

When the lawyer suggested Rush was just continuing what Norvill had done in those messages by writing in 2016 that he thought about her "more than is socially appropriate", she said, "I hadn't spent months sexually harassing him".

Norvill agreed an email she sent Rush during the final days of King Lear read as "quite loving" but said she was just trying to "keep it normal" and wasn't being sincere.

The judge-alone trial before Justice Michael Wigney continues.