| BIOGRAPHY
Possessing an unusual beauty marked by perhaps the most distinctive
set of lips in the business (an inheritance from father Steven
Tyler), Liv Tyler unsurprisingly made her entrance into acting
via the world of modeling. Since her breakthrough role in 1996's
Stealing Beauty, she has emerged as a performer with bona fide
talent, dropping her "model-actress" hyphenate in favor
of just "actress."
Born in Portland, ME, on July 1, 1977, to model and former 1970s
rock groupie Bebe Buell, Tyler spent most of her youth believing
that rocker Todd Rundgren was her father. However, as she grew
older, she began to notice more than a passing resemblance between
herself and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, who was a family
friend, and she ultimately discovered that he was indeed her biological
father. When she was 12, she took Tyler's last name as her own.
After experiencing obligatory preteen awkwardness -- hers featured
braces and a bit of a weight problem -- Tyler had blossomed enough
by the time she was 14 to consider modeling. She moved to New
York City in the company of her mother and began to pursue a career.
After appearing on the covers of magazines like Seventeen and
Mirabella, Tyler got her first taste of acting while filming a
television commercial. She made her film debut in 1994, as the
sister of an autistic boy in Bruce Beresford's Silent Fall, appearing
in the mystery alongside Richard Dreyfuss and Linda Hamilton.
Following this fairly auspicious debut, Tyler's next project,
1995's Empire Records, proved a disappointment on both commercial
and critical levels. Tyler kept at it, next starring as the unrequited
love interest of a reclusive pizza maker (Pruitt Taylor Vince)
in James Mangold's Heavy that same year. Her work in the critically
hailed film won her wide praise and her career began to take off.
Tyler's breakthrough came the following year in Bernardo Bertolucci's
Stealing Beauty. Starring as a 19-year-old who comes to Italy
to find her father and lose her virginity, she suddenly became
Hollywood's new "It" Girl, appearing on magazine covers
and as one of People's "50 Most Beautiful" in 1997.
After a lead as one of the titular Abbott sisters in Inventing
the Abbotts (1997) and a brief cameo in U-Turn the same year,
Tyler stepped into the realm of bloated budgets and even more
bloated box-office returns with her role as Bruce Willis' daughter
and Ben Affleck's girlfriend in Armageddon (1998). The following
year, she returned to the art house circuit with Robert Altman's
Cookie's Fortune. The film was widely praised, as was its ensemble
cast, which included Tyler, Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Charles
S. Dutton, Chris O'Donnell, and Ned Beatty. The same year, Tyler
lent her talents to the 18th century road movie genre, starring
opposite Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller in Plunkett and Macleane.
She also had a leading role as the object of Ralph Fiennes' jaded
affections in Martha Fiennes' Onegin, which premiered at the Toronto
Film Festival.
After taking the role of an irresistibly destructive seductress
in the 2001 comedy One Night at McCool's, Tyler took another trip
back in time, this time putting her pixyish beauty to ideal use
as Arwen, an elf faced with the daunting dilemma of choosing between
love and immortality in director Peter Jackson's grandiose, three-film
adaptation of J.R.R. Tolken's Lord of the Rings. |
FILMOGRAPHY
• Jersey Girl (2004)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
• Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
• One Night at McCool's (2001)
• Dr. T and the Women (2000)
• Cookie's Fortune (1999)
• Onegin (1999)
• Plunkett & Macleane (1999)
• Armageddon (1998)
• Inventing the Abbotts (1997)
• U-Turn (1997)
• Stealing Beauty (1996)
• That Thing You Do! (1996)
• Empire Records (1995)
• Silent Fall (1995)
• Heavy (1994) |
