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Liv Rundgren Tyler (born July 1, 1977) is an American actress and model. She is best known for her roles of Grace Stamper in Armageddon and Arwen in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. She is the daughter of Aerosmith's frontman, Steven Tyler. Possessing the same, sensual, full-lipped mouth as her famous rock singer father Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, the tall and lanky Liv Tyler initially followed in her mother Bebe Buell's footsteps and began a modeling career at the age of 14, though she soon soured on that profession. Raised by Buell and rock musician Todd Rundgren, she did not learn the true identity of her biological father until she was 11, but it was her appearance as a teen siren, along with future star Alicia Silverstone, in Aerosmith's "Crazy" video in 1994 that really put her on the map. That same year, Tyler made a strong feature debut in the unsettling role of a teenager who kills her sexually abusive father and complicit mother when she discovers him molesting her brother and then comes on to her therapist (Richard Dreyfuss) in Bruce Beresford's flawed thriller "Silent Fall". She followed with roles as the object of an overweight pizza chef's (Pruitt Taylor Vince) crush in James Mangold's "Heavy" and as a twentysomething slacker who was not as perfect as she seemed in Allan Moyle's disappointing "Empire Records" (both 1995). Tyler was born Liv Rundgren at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, New York. She is the first born daughter of Bebe Buell, a model, singer, and former Playboy Playmate of the month Miss November 1974, and Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith. Her maternal grandmother, Dorothea Johnson, founded the Protocol School of Washington. Her mother named her after Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann. At birth, Bebe Buell claimed that rock star Todd Rundgren was Tyler's biological father. Tyler thus spent most of her childhood living with that understanding, only discovering her true parentage at age nine. Liv discovered that she was Steven Tyler's daughter after meeting Steven Tyler and noticing that Steven Tyler's other daughter, Mia, looked very similar to herself. When she asked her mother about the similarity, the secret was revealed. The truth about Tyler's paternity did not become public until 1991, when she changed her name from Rundgren to Tyler, but kept the former as a middle name. Buell's alleged reason for the initial decision was that Steven Tyler was too heavily addicted to drugs at the time of Liv's birth. Since learning the truth about her paternity, Liv and Steven Tyler have developed a close relationship. They have also worked together professionally, once when Liv performed in Aerosmith's video "Crazy" and again when Aerosmith wrote and performed many of the songs in Liv's film Armageddon. Bernardo Bertolucci had searched high and low for a girl who could star in his "Stealing Beauty" (1996), someone who could embody innocence and lust, wisdom and youth, a virgin filled with desire. He had almost given up hope of finding the right actress when he met Tyler. "I felt immediately," he told US (June 1996), "that I'd found a kind of miracle." Paralleling her own mixed-up parentage, the film cast her as a young American girl who arrives in Italy knowing one father and leaves knowing another. At the erotic center of Bertolucci's meditation on the various forms of love, Tyler deftly captured the passage from childhood to adulthood, and Jeremy Irons was touching as the dying author renewed by his contact with her. Equally smitten was the director himself who indulged in one lingering close-up after another, allowing her to bask alone onscreen for much of her star-making turn. Woody Allen also cast her but later cut her cameo in the musical "Everyone Says I Love You", and she appeared in Tom Hanks' directorial debut, "That Thing You Do!" (both also 1996), as the girlfriend of the lead singer of a 60s rock band. Tyler attended the Congressional School of Virginia, Breakwater Elementary and Wayneflete schools (in Portland, Maine) before returning to New York City with her mother at the age of twelve. She went to York Prep in NYC for Junior High and High School, graduating in 1995. One month later Tyler set off for Italy, to star in Stealing Beauty. Starting a career as a model at the age of fifteen, Tyler appeared on the covers of magazines and starred in commercials for makeup. However, after becoming bored with modeling less than a year after starting to model, she quickly moved into acting. She never took acting lessons. She first became known to TV audiences when she starred alongside Alicia Silverstone in the music video for the Aerosmith song "Crazy" in 1993, which was voted #23 in VH1's top 100 music videos of all time. Between 1993 and 1996, she was in seven films. She was cast almost simultaneously for Silent Fall in 1994 and Heavy in 1995; the filming of Heavy was delayed until she became available. By the age of twenty, she had already starred in several successful movies, including Stealing Beauty (1996), That Thing You Do!(1996), and Inventing the Abbotts (1997). Her appearance in Armageddon, which was released on her 21st birthday in 1998, brought her to the attention of a wide public. The film included the songs "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" and "What Kind of Love Are You On" by her father's band. Tyler has proven herself a capable actress starring in such films as Onegin (1999), based on the 19th century Russian novel by Alexander Pushkin), in which she portrayed the character of Tatyana Larina. She also appeared in two movies directed by Robert Altman, Cookie's Fortune (1999) and Dr. T & the Women (2000). Tyler was the love object of three men (Matt Dillon, John Goodman and Paul Reiser) who all tell their tale of woe sitting around the bar in Harald Zwart's "One Night at McCool's" (2001), produced by Michael Douglas who also acted in the film. She reunited with Altman and "Cookie's Fortune" screenwriter Anne Rapp as one of the many women of "Dr T and the Women" (2000), starring Richard Gere as the titular gynecologist, surrounded by the likes of Helen Hunt, Laura Dern, Farrah Fawcett and Shelley Long, among others. She then took off for New Zealand to play Arwen, an elf princess who falls in love with a human, Aragorn, in Peter Jackson's three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, an ambitious undertaking employing 20,000 extras and 1200 state-of-the-art computer-generated effects. Released at Christmas time in 2001, 2002 and 2003, the three movies filmed at one time represented a considerable jump in scale for Tyler from her biggest picture, "Armageddon.” Tyler's most successful role came in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001), in which she played Arwen Undómiel. In 2008, she will star alongside Edward Norton in the upcoming The Incredible Hulk. Tyler was chosen by People magazine as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World in 1997. She was also voted the 6th Sexiest Female Movie Star in the Australian Empire Magazine in September 2002, and #2 in TheAge.com's "Top 100: Natural Beauties of all time" in 2004. In 2003, Tyler became the spokesperson for Givenchy Perfume and Cosmetics. After the first two installments of the "Rings" films, Tyler was again cast opposite Affleck in writer-director Kevin Smith's middling romantic comedy "Jersey Girl" (2004), playing Maya, the woman who re-opens a widowed father's heart to love. Tyler received good notices for her performance, though the film opened to mixed reviews and the ever-continuing media hype surrounding Affleck's break-up with Jennifer Lopez. In “Lonesome Jim” (2006), Tyler was a single mom and nurse who reconnects with an old fling (Casey Affleck), a failed novelist returned home after two-years of floundering in New York who has reservations about taking part in the family’s ladder business. She played a fetching and insightful therapist who tries to help a once-successful dentist (Adam Sandler) cope with the loss of his family on 9/11 in “Reign Over Me” (2007). Tyler dated actor Joaquin Phoenix from 1995 to November 1998. The couple met on the set of Inventing the Abbotts. On March 25, 2003, Tyler married British musician Royston Langdon of the band Spacehog in Barbados. On December 14, 2004, she gave birth to a son, Milo William Langdon, in a New York hospital. The Lemonheads' song "C'mon Daddy" is written about the relationship between Tyler and her father. Lemonheads singer, Evan Dando, played a major supporting role in James Mangold's film Heavy, in which Tyler starred. She lives in New York City. |
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