Hers is a classic story of an ugly duckling who turned into a swan. Liv Tyler- a former chubby brace-face, by her own account- started modeling at fourteen after puberty delivered some decided improvements to her physique and family friend Paulina Porizkova succeeded in coaxing her out of her baggy blue jeans long enough to pose for some portfolio Polaroids. Topping off at over five-foot-ten, and endowed with blazing blue eyes, flawless porcelain skin, and coltish limbs, Liv was a natural at aping sultry sophistication and, within just a few months, began decorating such fashion magazines as Seventeen and Mirabella.
While shooting a commercial on location in the stifling, mosquito-infested Amazon the following year, Liv somehow decided she wanted to act more than anything else. Not long after that, an agent read about the intriguing lass in an article in The New York Times concerning children of the rich and famous, and Liv was officially “discovered.” Her first feature role was as the older sister of an autistic boy in the Bruce Beresford straight-to-video drama Silent Fall (1994); Liv went 0-for-2 with her less-than-memorable follow-up film, Empire Records (1995).
The film was such a stultifying experience for the neophyte that she nearly abandoned acting altogether. But Liv persevered, and rebounded nicely with a role in the low-budget indie film, Heavy, and a break-out performance in famed Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty.
Liv was the toast of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, where Stealing Beauty was entered in competition. French critics ooh-la-laed over the young actress, nicknaming her Liv Taylor in deference to that other nubile young brunette starlet who rocked the Continent decades before. Bertolucci’s sentimental opus tells the coming-of-age story of a young American naif summering at a Tuscan villa who attempts to a) lose her virginity, and b) discover the identity of her father. The quest-for-deflowering story line aside, the film’s plot most certainly struck a chord with Liv, whose own search for her father’s identity is the stuff of a rock ballad.
The love child of an eight-month-long relationship between former Ford model, Playboy Playmate, sometime singer, and rock groupie Bebe Buell and full-lipped Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, little Liv grew up believing that her mother’s long-term boyfriend, rock musician Todd Rundgren, was her father. After all, her birth certificate said so. An early backstage introduction to Tyler at a Rundgren show, however, planted a niggling suspicion in her ten-year-old brain, and a subsequent encounter at an Aerosmith concert with Tyler’s daughter Mia, who was like a rubber stamp of Liv, prompted the curious young girl to confront her mother about the subject of her paternity. Buell confirmed that the Jagger-esque rocker was indeed her biological father, and Liv subsequently adopted the name Tyler as her own by her twelfth birthday. She has since remarked shruggingly of the whole situation, “It was the seventies.”