Being raised by women, music video embarrassment, calling out Hollywood. Liv Tyler has grown
up in the spotlight, but her transformation is much more than skin deep. Keep watching
for all the details!
It's well-known that Liv Tyler is the daughter of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, but she
was raised by the women in her life: her mother, grandmother, and aunt. Her mom Bebe Buell
was a former Playboy Playmate and groupie who had a tryst with the rock star that resulted
in an unexpected pregnancy. Buell was a struggling musician in New York City at the time, so
she needed help raising her daughter. So when Liv was 4 months old, she moved to the quaint
countryside of Portland, Maine to be near a cousin of Buell's, whom Liv calls "Aunt
Annie."
While Buell was off touring with her band, Liv would stay with her grandmother in the
suburbs of Washington, D.C., accompanying her to board meetings and ritzy garden parties.
Where Liv's mother was a fiery, passionate artist and her aunt was a source of stability,
her etiquette instructor grandmother was a paragon of sophistication. When Liv was 12,
she and her mother moved back to Manhattan, where her modeling career would soon take
off.
Bebe Buell may have led a nomadic lifestyle as an up-and-coming musician, but she was
still protective of her only child. Steven Tyler's struggle with drug addiction in the
70s and 80s was well-known, and Buell wanted to shield Liv from her father's excesses.
So she made a deal with another one of her suitors, musician Todd Rundgren, that he would
raise Liv as his own. Liv first met her biological father when she was eight at one of Rundgren's
concerts. As she recalled to Wonderland Magazine,
"I fell madly in love with him. I had no idea who he was."
A few years later, Buell took Liv to an Aerosmith concert, and she figured out the truth. As
she recalled to The Guardian in 2017,
"When I realized that Steven was my father, it was a moment that was bigger than me, it
was almost spiritual. When you meet kin, there is an energy and sparkle between your bodies.
It must be chemical somehow – DNA and genes. I felt a connection in a very strong way when
I met him as a little girl and I didn't know why at first, but I figured it out rather
quickly."
"And I looked at my mom, and she had tears in her eyes, and I kind of put it all together."
When she was 14, Liv Tyler began modeling, as she appeared in magazines such as Seventeen,
YM, and Italian Vogue. But she also quickly became disenchanted with the industry's impossible
standards of beauty and the insurmountable pressure these expectations placed on young
girls.
Tyler eventually started to feel that acting might be a better fit for her, and so, at
her mother's urging, she began auditioning and landed a few small parts. She was shy,
but she found that acting boosted her self-esteem and helped with her attention deficit disorder.
As she noted to The Guardian in 2001,
"Although most of what I did at school left me confused, it turned out I could really
focus on acting. I realized I could memorize lines, not just mine but everyone else's.
I finally had some confidence that I was actually good at something."
What do you get when you put two attractive young girls in Catholic schoolgirl outfits
and have them romp around town and get into all sorts of mischief? One of the most memorable
music videos of all time, that's what! At the age of 16, Liv Tyler got the opportunity
of a lifetime. That's when Marty Callner, the director of Aerosmith's "Crazy" video,
spotted her in a Pantene commercial and thought she'd be a perfect sidekick for Alicia Silverstone,
who had already starred in two other Aerosmith videos, "Cryin'" and "Amazing." It was only
later that Callner discovered that Liv was Steven Tyler's daughter.
"So he went to my dad and asked for permission."
"Crazy" was one of the most popular music videos of 1994, and it catapulted Liv's acting
career. She displayed a striking degree of fearlessness, as she danced with Silverstone
to defy good-girl expectations by swinging around a stripper pole and skinny dipping
with a farm-boy hunk, only to run away with his clothes. But looking back in 2014, Liv
admitted to MTV News that watching the "Crazy" video was difficult for her. As she put it,
"I was in high school when I made it and I would wake up in the morning for school, put
on the MTV countdown. And when the video would come on I'd get so embarrassed, that's when
I would get in the shower."
In 1996, Liv Tyler really showed off her acting chops as the female lead in the movie Stealing
Beauty. She played a young woman named Lucy who travels to Tuscany, Italy intent on losing
her virginity to the boy she kissed on her last vacation there four years prior. The
plot also had parallels with Tyler's real life, as Lucy's also on a mission to decode
a message in her deceased mother's diary to find her biological father.
The film received mixed reviews, though critics singled Tyler out for praise. Rolling Stone's
Peter Travers noted that she gave "a luminous performance," while The New York Times' Janet
Maslin declared,
"She [...] acquits herself with grace."
Tom Hanks, who cast Tyler in his feature directorial debut That Thing You Do!, agreed, as he told
Vanity Fair,
"There is no act going on with her. She is not pulling a sultry power trip with you the
way a lot of very beautiful women can — or have learned how to do."
After earning plenty of positive notices for Stealing Beauty, Tyler landed a very prominent
role in the 1998 disaster flick Armageddon, which depicts a group of ragtag oil drillers
who save the Earth from a cataclysmic asteroid strike. She starred opposite some of Hollywood's
biggest names of the time, including Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, and Billy Bob Thornton,
just to name a few.
Tyler played Willis' daughter and Affleck's love interest. Armageddon performed quite
well among ticket buyers, as it raked in just over $200 million at the domestic box office.
But it wasn't exactly a favorite among critics, with Roger Ebert for one writing,
"The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human
desire to be entertained. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get
out."
A few years later, Tyler appeared in an even more iconic role in the form of 2001's The
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of the Peter Jackson-directed trilogy
based on the epic fantasy novels by J. R. R. Tolkien. The films were a massive success,
as they grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide. Tyler played the elf maiden Arwen, a character
who had a relatively small role in the novels but who is significantly more memorable in
the films.
"I gotta say, you are Elvish, 'cause you have not aged a day-"
"Oh, thank you."
"Since, you started shooting that in 1998, right? 20 years ago!"
In 2003, Liv Tyler became a UNICEF ambassador, which means she advocates for children's basic
human rights, especially those who grow up in disadvantaged circumstances. She was inspired
to become an ambassador by her childhood idol, Audrey Hepburn. As she explained,
"I was really blown away and inspired by everything that she had done for children through UNICEF.
It really floored me in a way that I hadn't ever felt toward a public figure before."
Tyler has since become involved with additional charities, including the Breast Cancer Research
Foundation, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and Free Arts NYC, which provides low-income
children with access to the arts in New York. Giving back to others comes naturally to Tyler.
She's been charitable from a young age, as she's attuned to the needs of others and aware
of the world around her. As she told Elle in 2013,
"There are so many charities out there, and I'm so sensitive. I'm probably over-empathetic."
As a world-famous actress, a timeless beauty, and the daughter of a rock icon, Liv Tyler
seemed to have it all. But that wasn't everything she wanted out of life. As she came from a
large family herself, she wanted to be a mother. In 2004, she welcomed her first son, Milo,
with her then-husband, British rocker Royston Langdon. Naturally enough, she spent this
period in her life trying to find a balance between work and family. As she told the Irish
Independent in 2008,
"I'm still trying to figure it all out. Modeling and acting are what I've done since I was
14, so it's not like I have another option. But the balance can be hard for me, because
for my whole life, my dream was to be a mother."
Tyler and Langdon split in 2008, but she eventually found love again with sports agent Dave Gardner.
They welcomed a son named Sailor in 2015 and a daughter named Lula the following year.
If finding balance was difficult before, adding two more children to the mix unsurprisingly
heightened the chaos. But Tyler managed to pull it off, as she embraced the learning
opportunities that came with motherhood. As she put it to More Magazine in 2020,
"Having children, I learned about my own strength."
"Do they go easy on you with the scenes that they give you, scenes which are less emotionally
draining, 'cause you are in a different frame of mind?"
"Um, no."
Liv Tyler was all over the big screen in the early 2000s, but then she more or less disappeared
from the spotlight. One reason for this was that, like many of her female colleagues,
she felt slighted by the film industry because of her age. As she explained to More Magazine
in 2015 when she was 38,
"Thirty-eight is a crazy number [...] At [my age], you’re usually the wife or the girlfriend,
a sort of second-class citizen. There are more interesting roles for women when they
get a bit older."
Tyler got her chance for one of those more interesting roles in 2014 in the form of HBO's
The Leftovers, a show set in a dystopian world where two percent of the planet's population
mysteriously vanishes. As Tyler revealed to The Guardian before the show premiered in
the U.K.,
"I actually prayed to the universe [after auditioning] to show me a sign, that if the
project happened, it was a sign that I was meant to keep acting."
Tyler played the part of the unpredictable Meg Abbott, which provided exactly the acting
challenge that she was hoping for. As she explained during a Q&A at Oxford Union in
2018,
"[Meg] had really big, explosive reactions to things. I couldn't think too much about
it. I just had to ... go for it. And it was really life-changing for me in a lot of ways.
Ever since then, I've been a little more free."
After the third and final season of The Leftovers wrapped up in 2017, Tyler continued making
it happen on the small screen. That same year, she starred on the historical drama Gunpowder,
as well as Harlots, a period drama about opposing brothels set in 18th-century London.
Hardly skipping a beat, in 2020 she then joined the cast of 9-1-1: Lone Star, a Fox drama
about the fire, police, and ambulance departments in Austin, Texas.
"Michelle Blake, paramedic captain. And this scene is medical, so I run the call."
Tyler made a big impression in the show's first season, so fans were stunned when it
was announced that she wouldn't be returning for Season 2. But it turned out she had a
good reason for leaving. She reportedly asked producers to write off her character, since
traveling from London to Los Angeles was too risky for her during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fortunately, one of the show's co-creators, Tim Minear, gave some positive news regarding
her sudden departure, as he said in a statement,
"The door here will always be open for a return."
What's next for this Renaissance woman? Whatever endeavor she pursues, it's clear that she
won't let life's simple pleasures pass her by. As she told The Guardian back in 2001,
"Life excites me [...] just little, normal, everyday things. Getting out of bed. Getting
dressed. Making food. I find it all exciting, you know?"
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