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| 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 plain "actress." Born in Portland, Maine 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 front man Steven Tyler, who was a family friend, and she ultimately discovered that he was indeed her biological father. When she was twelve, she took Tyler's last name as her own. After experiencing obligatory pre-teen 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 the 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 arthouse 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 eighteenth-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 in September at the Toronto Film Festival. |
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