Possessing the same, sensual, full-lipped mouth as her famous rock singer father Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, the tall and lanky Liv Tyler initially followed in her mother Bebe Buell's footsteps and began a modeling career at the age of 14, though she soon soured on that profession. Raised by Buell and rock musician Todd Rundgren, she did not learn the true identity of her biological father until she was 11, but it was her appearance as a teen siren, along with future star Alicia Silverstone, in Aerosmith's "Crazy" video in 1994 that really put her on the map. That same year, Tyler made a strong feature debut in the unsettling role of a teenager who kills her sexually abusive father and complicit mother when she discovers him molesting her brother and then comes on to her therapist (Richard Dreyfuss) in Bruce Beresford's flawed thriller "Silent Fall". She followed with roles as the object of an overweight pizza chef's (Pruitt Taylor Vince) crush in James Mangold's "Heavy" and as a twentysomething slacker who was not as perfect as she seemed in Allan Moyle's disappointing "Empire Records" (both 1995).
Bernardo Bertolucci had searched high and low for a girl who could star in his "Stealing Beauty" (1996), someone who could embody innocence and lust, wisdom and youth, a virgin filled with desire. He had almost given up hope of finding the right actress when he met Tyler. "I felt immediately," he told US (June 1996), "that I'd found a kind of miracle." Paralleling her own mixed-up parentage, the film cast her as a young American girl who arrives in Italy knowing one father and leaves knowing another. At the erotic center of Bertolucci's meditation on the various forms of love, Tyler deftly captured the passage from childhood to adulthood, and Jeremy Irons was touching as the dying author renewed by his contact with her. Equally smitten was the director himself who indulged in one lingering close-up after another, allowing her to bask alone onscreen for much of her star-making turn. Woody Allen also cast her but later cut her cameo in the musical "Everyone Says I Love You", and she appeared in Tom Hanks' directorial debut, "That Thing You Do!" (both also 1996), as the girlfriend of the lead singer of a 60s rock band.
After starring in yet another coming-of-age tale, Pat O'Connor's rather anemic "Inventing the Abbotts" (1997), in which she sensitively rendered the meatiest of the three Abbott sisters, Tyler embarked on "Armageddon" (1998), her first commercial blockbuster amidst a steady diet of art-house films. As Bruce Willis' daughter and Ben Affleck's love interest, she got her first taste of the kind of inane story that can make hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to Disney's marketing muscle. She was back on more familiar terrain for her three movies released in 1999. She joined an all-star cast that included Patricia Neal, Glenn Close, Julianne Moore and Charles S Dutton for Robert Altman's leisurely Southern Gothic comedy "Cookie's Fortune", winning raves for her rough-and-tumble, catfish-cleaning, box-toting "worthless tramp" of a daughter. She also graced the casts of Jake Scott's "Plunkett & Macleane" and Martha Fiennes' "Onegin,” acquitting herself particularly well in the latter as Pushkin's Tatyana. Initially spurned by Onegin (Ralph Fiennes), she later gives him his own medicine in this classic tale of amorous mistiming.
Tyler was the love object of three men (Matt Dillon, John Goodman and Paul Reiser) who all tell their tale of woe sitting around the bar in Harald Zwart's "One Night at McCool's" (2001), produced by Michael Douglas who also acted in the film. She reunited with Altman and "Cookie's Fortune" screenwriter Anne Rapp as one of the many women of "Dr T and the Women" (2000), starring Richard Gere as the titular gynecologist, surrounded by the likes of Helen Hunt, Laura Dern, Farrah Fawcett and Shelley Long, among others. She then took off for New Zealand to play Arwen, an elf princess who falls in love with a human, Aragorn, in Peter Jackson's three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, an ambitious undertaking employing 20,000 extras and 1200 state-of-the-art computer-generated effects. Released at Christmas time in 2001, 2002 and 2003, the three movies filmed at one time represented a considerable jump in scale for Tyler from her biggest picture, "Armageddon.”
After the first two installments of the "Rings" films, Tyler was again cast opposite Affleck in writer-director Kevin Smith's middling romantic comedy "Jersey Girl" (2004), playing Maya, the woman who re-opens a widowed father's heart to love. Tyler received good notices for her performance, though the film opened to mixed reviews and the ever-continuing media hype surrounding Affleck's break-up with Jennifer Lopez. In “Lonesome Jim” (2006), Tyler was a single mom and nurse who reconnects with an old fling (Casey Affleck), a failed novelist returned home after two-years of floundering in New York who has reservations about taking part in the family’s ladder business. She played a fetching and insightful therapist who tries to help a once-successful dentist (Adam Sandler) cope with the loss of his family on 9/11 in “Reign Over Me” (2007).