Liv Tyler

She found out Steven Tyler was her father at an Aerosmith concert when she was 11. The tell was another girl standing offstage who looked exactly like her, Mia Tyler, Steven's daughter by another woman born a year after Liv. Bebe Buell confirmed it, she has said, on a bench outside the amphitheater. Liv changed her last name from Rundgren to Tyler, started modeling at 14, and got cast by Bernardo Bertolucci in Stealing Beauty (1996) without a single acting lesson. Armageddon (1998) finished the origin story: Aerosmith performed the theme song for his daughter's movie.

Playing Arwen across the Lord of the Rings trilogy gave her the franchise association most 2000s actresses would have killed for, though she spent months training with swords for battle scenes Jackson cut entirely. The rest of her filmography went smaller: The Leftovers on HBO was the standout, a grief drama that suited her quiet intensity. In February 2025, she reprised Betty Ross in Captain America: Brave New World, 17 years after The Incredible Hulk (2008). That gap is the story of her career.

Her mother named her after Liv Ullmann after spotting the Norwegian actress on a TV Guide cover in March 1977. She had ADHD growing up and struggled badly enough that she switched to a New York school specifically built around learning differences. She never took an acting lesson, yet Robert Altman cast her in Cookie's Fortune (1999) without any stage credentials. The same traits that made school miserable made her interesting on camera.