Liv Tyler

• 1. Introduction

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  Liv Tyler owes her first name to a magazine cover. Her mother, the model and singer Bebe Buell, saw the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann on the TV Guide issue of the 5th of March 1977, and she chose the name for her coming daughter.

  That daughter was born on the 1st of July 1977 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. She was not born Tyler. Her surname at birth was Rundgren, and it belonged to a man whose place in her life was far more layered than a surname suggests.

  Three questions run through her story. Why did a girl born with one surname take a different one while still a teenager? How does a former teenage model end up playing an Elf in a trilogy that became one of the highest-grossing film series of all time? And what does an actress do with that kind of fame once the cameras move on?

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• 2. Two Fathers

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  Bebe Buell lived with the rock musician Todd Rundgren from 1972 to 1979. Buell was a model and singer, and she had been the Playboy Playmate for November 1974. In 1976 she became pregnant after a brief relationship with Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith.

  By the time the baby arrived, the romance between Buell and Rundgren had ended. Rundgren signed the birth certificate anyway. He acted as a father to the girl and paid for her education.

  Buell later gave her reason for naming Rundgren as the father. Steven Tyler was heavily addicted to drugs when the baby was born. Liv never stopped treating Rundgren as family. She told People magazine in 1992 that he was her "spiritual father." In 2009 she told Wonderland Magazine, "I'm so grateful to him, I have so much love for him." She added that when he holds her, it feels like Daddy.

  When Liv was ten or eleven, she met Steven Tyler for the first time. She noticed how much his face resembled her own and began to suspect he was her father. She asked her mother, and the secret came out.

  The truth stayed out of public view until 1991. That year Liv changed her surname from Rundgren to Tyler and kept Rundgren as a middle name. Over time she built a close relationship with Steven. She also has three half-siblings: Mia Tyler, born in 1978, Chelsea Anna Tyler Foster, born in 1989, and Taj Monroe Tallarico, born in 1991.

  On her mother's side, her grandmother Dorothea Johnson founded the Protocol School of Washington. That grandmother would one day write a book with Liv.

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• 3. Model Without Lessons

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  At 14, Tyler landed her first modeling job with help from Paulina Porizkova. Porizkova took pictures of her that ended up in Interview magazine, and television commercials followed.

  Less than a year into modeling, Tyler grew bored and decided to try acting. She never took an acting lesson. In 1993 she starred alongside Alicia Silverstone in the music video for Aerosmith's song "Crazy," the band led by her father Steven. That video is how many television viewers first met her.

  Her schooling was as unsettled as her early career. She attended the Congressional School of Virginia, Breakwater School, and Waynflete School in Portland, Maine. At age 12 she returned to New York City with her mother.

  Her mother researched York Preparatory School in New York City because it could accommodate Tyler's ADHD. She attended it for junior high and high school. She also spent time at the Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica, California.

  Tyler has said that her teenage years left little room for a childhood. In her words, "I've been working since I was 14. But that also kept me out of trouble. When everybody was doing acid and partying like crazy, I was at work on a movie in Tuscany." She added that she has no regrets.

  She graduated from York in 1995 and left school to continue her acting career. By then her first film was already behind her.

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• 4. Breakthrough in Tuscany

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  Silent Fall, released in 1994, gave Tyler her feature film debut. She played the elder sister of a boy with autism. The following year she starred in the comedy-drama Empire Records, which she later called "one of the best experiences" she has ever had.

  In 1995 she also took a supporting part in James Mangold's drama Heavy, playing Callie, a naive young waitress. The film drew favorable reviews. The critic Janet Maslin wrote, "Ms. Tyler... gives a charmingly ingenuous performance, betraying no self-consciousness about her lush good looks."

  Her breakthrough came with Stealing Beauty in 1996, an arthouse film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Tyler played Lucy Harmon, a romantic teenager who travels to Tuscany, Italy, hoping to lose her virginity. Reviews of the film were mixed, but critics responded warmly to her.

  Bertolucci had met a number of young girls in Los Angeles before choosing her, and Silverstone was among them. He said, "there was something missing in all of them." In Tyler he saw a gravitas that he described as "a New York aura."

  Variety wrote, "Tyler is the perfect accomplice." Empire magazine saw her as radiantly resembling "a ganglier young Ava Gardner." During promotion, Tyler said she tried not to think about her own situation while filming. Even so, after one take, she recalled, "I just started to cry and cry," remembering the moment she learned the truth about her father.

  Her next film would be written and directed by one of the most famous actors in Hollywood, Tom Hanks.

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• 5. Hits and Misses

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  Tom Hanks wrote and directed That Thing You Do! in 1996. It follows a fictional one-hit wonder band called The Oneders, renamed The Wonders, as they race up the pop charts and drop back into obscurity just as fast. The film earned favorable reviews and grossed over $25 million worldwide.

  In 1997 Tyler appeared in Inventing the Abbotts, playing the daughter of the characters portrayed by Will Patton and Barbara Williams. The film is based on a short story by Sue Miller. Entertainment Weekly called her performance "lovely and pliant." That same year, People magazine named her one of its 50 Most Beautiful People.

  Armageddon in 1998 put her at the center of a summer blockbuster. She played the daughter of Bruce Willis's character and the love interest of Ben Affleck's character. Reviews were mixed, yet the film earned $553 million worldwide. It featured the Aerosmith songs "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" and "What Kind of Love Are You On."

  Tyler told The Guardian in 2001 that she nearly walked away from it. "I really didn't want to do it at first and I turned it down a couple of times," she said. Fear was the reason she changed her mind, because she wanted to try something that scared her.

  Onegin in 1999 took her far from Hollywood spectacle. The film is based on Alexander Pushkin's 19th-century Russian novel, and she played Tatyana Larina opposite Ralph Fiennes. She had to master an English accent. Stephen Holden of The New York Times found her approximation "inert." The film failed both critically and financially. That same year she also appeared in the historical comedy Plunkett & Macleane.

  Robert Altman directed Tyler twice. In Cookie's Fortune in 1999, she joined an ensemble that included Glenn Close, Richard Gere, Julianne Moore, Chris O'Donnell, and Patricia Neal. Salon.com judged it the first time her acting matched her beauty. Entertainment Weekly called her "sweetly gruff as the tomboy troublemaker."

  In Altman's Dr. T & the Women in 2000, she played Marilyn, a gynecological patient of Gere's character. Marilyn is also the lesbian lover of his daughter, played by Kate Hudson.

  In 2001, One Night at McCool's cast her as the object of infatuation for three men, played by Matt Dillon, John Goodman, and Paul Reiser. She said it was the first role that made her so physically aware of being watched. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone felt her range was too limited for the part.

  That same year, a very different film reached theaters with Peter Jackson in the director's chair.

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• 6. Elf Maiden Arwen

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  Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring reached screens in 2001, with Tyler as the Elf maiden Arwen Undómiel. The film adapts the first volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The filmmakers approached her after seeing her work in Plunkett & Macleane.

  To play Arwen, she learned to speak the Elvish language that Tolkien created. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle called her performance "lovely and earnest."

  The Two Towers, released in 2002, asked even more of her. Tyler spent months learning sword fighting for the concluding battle scenes. After the script changed, those scenes were removed. The film still earned over $926 million worldwide, out-grossing its predecessor, which had earned over $871 million.

  The third and last installment, The Return of the King, followed in 2003.

  After Middle-earth, Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl in 2004 reunited her with her Armageddon co-star Ben Affleck. She played a woman who meets a widowed father, played by Affleck, and reopens his heart to love. Tyler told MTV News she felt "scared and vulnerable" during filming.

  She explained the contrast with her Elf years. Much of the Lord of the Rings work happened in post-production, while this film "was really just about me and Ben sitting there, just shooting off dialogue."

  Her next role came from the actor Steve Buscemi, in an independent drama set in a small Indiana town.

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• 7. Genre Roles and Television

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  Steve Buscemi's independent drama Lonesome Jim, released in 2005, paired Tyler with Casey Affleck. She played a single mother and nurse who reconnects with an old fling. He has come home to their small Indiana town after a failed run as a novelist in New York. The film screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize.

  In Reign Over Me in 2007, she played an insightful therapist. Her patient was a once-successful dentist, played by Adam Sandler, who is coping with the loss of his family in the September 11 attacks.

  The Strangers in 2008 set her in a remote country house with Scott Speedman. They play a young couple terrorized in one night by three masked assailants. Critics were mixed, but the film earned more than $80 million on a $9 million budget. She told Entertainment Weekly it was her most challenging role: "It was as far as I could push myself in every way: physically, emotionally, mentally."

  That same year she played Dr. Betty Ross, the love interest of Edward Norton's title character, in The Incredible Hulk. Tyler had been a fan of the television show and was drawn to the love story in the script. She compared her performance to "a deer caught in the headlights." The Washington Post praised the gentleness she brought to the one person able to calm the Hulk. The film earned over $262 million worldwide against a $150 million budget.

  Tyler appeared in Super and The Ledge in 2011. In April 2011, the publishing house Rodale announced that she and her grandmother Dorothea Johnson, an etiquette expert, had written a book called Modern Manners. It was released on the 29th of October 2013.

  In 2014 she appeared in Space Station 76, directed by Jack Plotnick and starring Matt Bomer and Patrick Wilson. She also appeared in Carter Smith's horror-drama Jamie Marks Is Dead. In June 2014 she became a regular in the HBO supernatural drama The Leftovers, which ended in 2017 after three seasons.

  Wildling, a fantasy-horror drama directed by Fritz Böhm, cast her opposite Bel Powley in 2016. It marked her debut as a producer and was released in 2018.

  In 2017 she played Anne Vaux in the BBC and HBO miniseries Gunpowder, alongside Kit Harington. She then joined the period drama Harlots as Lady Isabella Fitzwilliam, a regular in its second and third series.

  In 2019 she co-starred opposite Brad Pitt in the science fiction drama Ad Astra, which earned positive reviews. In 2020 she began a starring role as Michelle Blake in the Fox procedural 9-1-1: Lone Star, a spin-off of 9-1-1.

  On the 1st of June 2020, she joined Josh Gad's YouTube series Reunited Apart. The show reunites casts of popular movies by video-conferencing and promotes donations to charity. Her Lord of the Rings castmates included Sean Astin, Sean Bean, Orlando Bloom, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, and Elijah Wood, with Peter Jackson also joining.

  In February 2025, she returned as Betty Ross in Captain America: Brave New World, 15 years after her first appearance in The Incredible Hulk.

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• 8. Life Off Screen

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  In 2003, Tyler became the spokesperson for Givenchy perfume and cosmetics. In 2005 the brand named a rose after her, which was used in one of its fragrances. In 2009 she signed on for two more years.

  On the 8th of December 2011, Givenchy announced a collaboration between its perfumes and Sony Music. In a video released on the 7th of February 2012, Tyler covered the INXS song "Need You Tonight."

  That same year of 2003, she was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for the United States for UNICEF. In November 2004 she hosted the lighting of the UNICEF Snowflake in New York City. She was also a spokesperson for a 2004 Givenchy Mother's Day promotion supporting UNICEF's Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus campaign.

  Since 2004, she has donated to the Women's Cancer Research Fund, which supports research, education, and outreach on early diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of women's cancers. In October 2007 she helped launch the Emergen-C Pink energy drink with her mother and grandmother, at an event honoring Breast Cancer Awareness month.

  In December 2012, Tyler took part in a charity gala for the David Lynch Foundation, which provides transcendental meditation to disadvantaged groups. She learned the practice in New York City. At the gala she said, "It helps me make better decisions and be a better mother, and just deal with the daily stress of the modern world that we live in."

  From 1995 to 1998 she dated her Inventing the Abbotts co-star Joaquin Phoenix. She became a vegan during that relationship, then went back to eating meat once it ended.

  In 1998 she began dating the British musician Royston Langdon of the band Spacehog. They became engaged in February 2001 and married in Barbados on the 25th of March 2003. A son was born in December 2004. On the 8th of May 2008, they confirmed through representatives that they were separating.

  In 2014 Tyler met David Gardner, a British sports and entertainment manager. They became engaged in July 2015 and ended the engagement in March 2021. They have two children together, a son born in February 2015 and a daughter born in July 2016.

  In 2001 she bought a townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village for $2.53 million. She sold it in 2019 for $17.45 million. Since 2018 she has lived with her family in London. She also owns a house in Malibu, California.

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