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Liv's English love affair
By Joanna Weinberg, Evening Standard Last updated at 00:00am on 06.12.02
It's 9am and Liv Tyler is already having a bad day. Getting up early, particularly to do press, is not one of her pleasures. She tears into her breakfast of a bagel and fruit with some appetite, trying to wake herself up. In an industry that suffers from constant, self-administered famine, it's a relief to see an actress eating. Dressed in a very crumpled white embroidered gypsy top from Marc Jacobs, jeans and flip-flops, and no make-up, there's nothing pretentious about her early-morningness. Her sleep was simply interrupted too soon on a weekend off filming Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl (also starring Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck). She's a little grouchy and unforthcoming, the girl at school who'd rather sit at the back of the class and dream.
Still, all 5ft 10in of her Snow White creaminess is dutifully here at an unremarkable New York hotel to promote the highly anticipated second instalment of the gigantic The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Two Towers is shortly to hit every screen in the country, and will ensure that she, as leading lady (she plays Arwen of the Elves), remains at the top of every movie studio's A-list. 'In the first film there was a lot of explaining to do,' she says. 'In this one, you already know the characters and what's going on, so it gets to be more intense and powerful. Dangerous and scary and wild,' she whispers with some drama.
When Tyler speaks, the sound is more like a musical instrument than a voice, something unusual and silvery from the wind section. Breath, with noise behind it. From the Monroe-esque whisper, you might confuse her with a wide-eyed ingénue, but Tyler is well-versed in her dealings with the wider world. She smiles a lot, and her eyes are not cold but there is just a slight wariness about her. Having recently given up smoking ('miserable'), she fiddles - with her hair, the toggles on her top, her glass of water.
Tyler has certainly got more to be defensive about than many. Her story, now almost legendary, goes something like this: Liv Rundgren grew up in Maine with her mother Bebe Buell, the most famous groupie of the Seventies on whom Kate Hudson's character in Almost Famous was modelled, and her 'father', musician Todd Rundgren. Around the age of 12, she went with her mother to an Aerosmith concert - frontman Steve Tyler was a 'friend'. Backstage, Liv was introduced to his daughter Mia. They were the spitting image of each other, and Liv asked her mother whether Tyler was really her dad. They had the same mouth, the same movements. (Even now, she says, she is fascinated by this, by gaining a family that looks and moves like her.) Suddenly, she had a 'new' father, one who had been kept from her because of his years of drug abuse, prominence, and unsettled lifestyle (he's still in trouble: Tyler is currently being named in a case in America in which it is claimed he received a gun permit from an NYPD official in exchange for concert and after-party tickets). 'I was so young and I was really confused, but I wasn't angry. I was more innocent about it, and I felt excited that I would have two dads instead of no dad at all.'
In fact, she was brought up by a web of extended family - her aunt and uncle, her grandparents, and then shifting between her mother who was in Maine for much of her childhood, and then between her two fathers - one in New York, the other in LA. 'Yeah, my childhood was not easy. I've definitely been through a lot. But I'm really lucky, I've had a lot of love in my life from all of my family, but it has also been incredibly complicated, the whole thing, particularly for a child, you know. But I'm here now, and I'm OK for it. It's made me very strong, and I'm grateful for that, and I'm happy to be alive, really.' She remains, she says, as close to them as she can be. 'Given that they're all nutters,' she laughs.
She attributes much of her recent stability to her relationship with musician Royston Langdon, 30, whose family live in a semi-detached house in Headingley, Leeds. He is the lead singer of the rock band Spacehog who, like Bush, have found greater success in the States than at home. After such a turbulent childhood, she says it's incredible to have had now, for four years, someone solid and dependable in her life.
Even in the very dark times when she's being ' embarrassing or selfish or needy or insecure' it's been amazing to her to know that there is someone who is going to stick around to help her work it all out - 'a really major thing'. They have been engaged for almost two years, with no date set for their wedding as yet. It's somewhat of an issue in America, where weddings are very much the focal point of a long-term relationship, but to Tyler, the idea still feels fresh and new, and she's not in any hurry. She only turned 25 this year, after all.
Her family, she says, adore him. 'We just went and visited my family in Maine, and we were at a party, and everyone fell for him, from the 13-year-olds, all of my aunts, all of my grandparents. It must be his sexy, cute Northern English accent.' They have recently bought a house in Manhattan, which they have totally gutted and are gradually, painfully, putting back together. 'It's a moneypit, like a Tom Hanks movie,' she grins. She can't wait to move in, though admits that she's not entirely domesticated. 'All that stuff you read about me being a homebody is wrong. I'm not like that at all, actually'.
Earlier this year, she followed Spacehog on tour around America, supporting Oasis and The Black Crowes, travelling through the night on the bus with them and arriving directly at the venue without even stopping at a hotel to shower and change. 'I was a real rock chick. It was one of the most fun times of my life. I really enjoyed everyone; people were so sweet, and kind of the opposite of how they're written. I thought Noel and Liam Gallagher were absolutely adorable. I had a really fun time with them and I was surprised by how nice they were.'
Read my lips: Liv looks remarkably like her 'real' father, Steve Tyler, right, as well as her half-sister Mia, above right (with Liv's mother Bebe Buell). Above: Liv as Arwen in The Two Towers
'People being nice to you,' she continues, is definitely her favourite by-product of fame. 'Maybe people would be nice to me if I wasn't famous, I don't know.'
From her unsettled early years, she agrees that she learnt to adapt, to fit in with wherever she was. She picked up accents and manners and still has that tendency. Even while we were talking, she ditched 'ant' for 'aunt', and 'I don't care' for 'can't be arsed'. It was, perhaps, this malleability that appealed to Bernardo Bertolucci, who cast her in her breakthrough role in Stealing Beauty when she was 16, a role she worked very hard to get. Certainly, she claims it wasn't her status as daughter of one of the most famous rock stars in the country that helped her secure the part - 'he didn't know' she claims - although one suspects she's wrong.
Her range at 25 is already surprising, from that first virginal role to the knowing, manipulative puss in One Night at McCool's with Matt Dillon and Michael Douglas, to the tough, Southern, catfishcleaning granddaughter in Altman's Cookie's Fortune, alongside Glenn Close and Julianne Moore. While you might expect her strong physical presence to dominate roles, in fact, she has an ability to express strength, vulnerability, humour and eccentricity with equal authenticity.
As Arwen, who is Elvish and the most beautiful of all creatures of Middle Earth, she is the marker of the passing of time. In love with a human, she is faced with the choice of living and dying with him in the few short years that a human life has, or staying with her father and eternal life. Having spent nearly half of her own life acting, Tyler is particularly aware of the passing of time. From a very young age, she took photographs of everything, recorded phone messages, tried to remember all the good things. She says she's already shocked by the ageing process she can see in herself when she watches something she made when she was 16, but that it is more the idea of age than the physical process of it. 'I'm not really vain about it, and it's not like I've got wrinkles or anything, but to be constantly reminded of it, that's weird. Time goes so fast, I'm very sentimental about it passing. I want everything to last forever, every moment that is beautiful, I don't take those things for granted.'
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is released on 18 December
