ELLE’S BELLE

Living it up

Backstage at ny major rock concert, there are numerous long-haired musicians mashing lips with impossible tall and often beautiful groupies. NO good could possibly come out of this brief clash between grunge and glamour, you'd think. But then you haven't met Liv Tyler.
Following an affaire de coeur between Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and former model Bebe Buell back in the Seventies, actress Liv Tyler was born. In some trick of genetics, Liv inherited her father's bee-stung lips and his long-legged frame, while the Gods of Future Movie Stars awarded the ingenue with here mother's high cheekbones and firm derriere.
It was enough to attract the attention of family friend, model Paulina Porizkova, who took some photos of the 14-year-old Liv which appeared in

18-year-old Rock
'n' Roll progeny, Liv Tyler, the frolicking schoolgirl in Aerosmith's Crazy video, is stealing scenes as Hollywood's latest Lolita. Despite playing the muse to big-wigs
like Bertolucci and Woody Allen, Rachelle Unreich finds Tyler endearingly modest about here new-found fame and here
future plans.

Interview Magazine and soon led to modeling assignments. But a short stint on the catwalk proved modeling was not Liv's calling: "It was fun and it was interesting, but I didn't want to do it forever," she says.
After toying with the idea of studying marine biology, Liv turned here sights to the big screen and was cast by Australian director Bruce Beresford in Silent Fall (in which she plays a nymphomaniac). Now only 18, she is the star of Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty, playmother's recent suicide and ends up the virginal obsession of several men, including Jeremy Irons.

Liv is dressed in Isaac, the new casual and affordable line embodying ‘American star quality’, from Isaac Mizrahi.

After that, she'll be seen in That Things You Do!, Tom Hanks' directorial debut, and with Joaquin Phoenix in Investing the Abbots. Yet, despite this steady demand for here talent, Tylker manages to remain unfazed: "A lot of people will tell you you're beautiful, which is nice, but then you hear it often enough and you realize they're blowing sunshine up your butt".
Perhaps Liv's dramatic success is not at all that surprising, considering here life story. In a soap opera scenario, Liv grew up thinking that singer Todd Rundgren was her real father - his name was on here birth certificate and he made dutiful paternal visits. In reality, here father was Steven Tyler, whose drug addiction at that time led here mother to name Rundgren (at his aquiesence) as the father. It was only when Liv met Tyler that she saw the similarities: "I noticed we had the same legs," she explains. Two years later, when she was 10, Liv met her half-sister, Mia, and realised she was looking at a mirror image of herself. She confronted here mother and the truth came out.
Looking towards her future career in the movies, Liv says, "I would definitely like to be ugly in a film. That would be fun. But there's double-standard. If men gain weight or have scars, It's cool. If women do that, casting directors start to say, 'I don't know if I want to work with her - she looks bad."
It's a problem, one suspects, with which Tyler will never have to deal.