MELBOURNE, Australia — The Oscar-winning Australian actor Geoffrey Rush will be awarded 2.9 million Australian dollars in his defamation case against Rupert Murdoch’s Nationwide News, a court said on Thursday, the largest such payout to a single person in Australia’s history.

Mr. Rush was awarded 850,000 dollars, or about $600,000, in initial damages in April after winning his defamation case, in which he accused a tabloid newspaper of wrongly portraying him as having behaved inappropriately toward a female co-star.

On Thursday, he was awarded an additional 1.98 million Australian dollars for past and future economic losses and 42,000 dollars in interest. That brought the total award to 2.9 million Australian dollars, or nearly $2 million.

“Geoffrey Rush obviously has won the battle — he is a spectacular winner in the context of litigation,” said Matt Collins, an Australian lawyer who is an expert in defamation law. “But you would query whether he has ultimately won the war. You would query whether any sum of money would be sufficient to restore his reputation.”