LIVING IT UP!

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Could it be that womanhood has simply gone out of fashion? Listen to a supermodel speak and you will hear her referring to her Chanel-outfitted colleagues as "girls." See twentysomethings like Winona Ryder, Juliette Lewis or Uma Thurman in movies and interviews and you realize that young actresses do not seem to be all that interested in growing up and getting out of their baseball sneakers. In the '90s, ingenuedom has become interminable: Lauren Bacall was a woman at 19; Sandra Bullock and Sarah Jessica Parker are girls at 31. But then many young actresses today work harder at charming us with their boppy neuroses than luring us with their sensuality.

But of this Liv Tyler is not guilty. A card-carrying adolescent, less than a month shy of her 19th birthday, Tyler is an ingenue unflustered by her sexuality, one who has lately been busy cultivating her inner grownup. She will appear in four movies in the next year, having caught the eye of some world-class directors. Woody Allen, for instance, who cast her in his latest film but, alas, had to drop the subplot line in which she was featured when the first cut of the movie ran over three hours. Nevertheless, the reticent director calls her "a wonderful actress, a delight." Bernardo Bertolucci is equally enamored: the actress stars in his latest film, a midsummer night's Tuscan dream called Stealing Beauty, which opens this week. Last week she finished shooting a film with the Irish director Pat O'Connor, who previously made Circle of Friends. And then there's That Thing You Do, well known in Hollywood as Tom Hanks' directorial debut, in which Tyler plays the groupie of a small-town band in the early '60s. This film wrapped earlier this year and will be out in the fall.

These are certainly soigne show-business circles, especially for a model-actress who first came to the world's attention wearing a silver bra in an unseemly Aerosmith video featuring her father, the band's lead singer Steven Tyler. Because Liv grew up obsessed with movies like Night of the Living Dead rather than movies like The Conformist, working with heavyweight directors has been admittedly scary. "There was all this internal fear," she reflects.

While Tyler's talents as an actress may still be developing--or debatable, depending on your point of view--it is her presence, her matter-of-fact ease with her sensuality, her odd combination of coltishness and placidity that have turned her into an art-house goddess, an American answer to European actresses like Emmanuelle Beart and Julie Delpy. Her two current films present Tyler as an almost celestial object around whom innumerable admirers revolve. Both Stealing Beauty and director James Mangold's Heavy--which won a Grand Jury prize at the Sundance film festival this year--drop her in insular worlds where her beauty and quiet sexuality generate more rattle than hum. Yet Tyler also projects a work-in-progress quality, an appropriately teenage openness. Mangold says he knew as soon as he met Tyler that she would make an ideal Callie, the kindly waitress who intoxicates an overweight loner (Pruitt Taylor Vince) with whom she works in a grim, paneled pizzeria. "I needed someone to fill several bills," he explains. "She had to be devastatingly beautiful but she had to contradict our assumptions about someone who looks like that. I could really see Liv bonding with this guy. She came with this asset of a humongous heart."

That same innocence and lack of inhibition come through in Stealing Beauty. As Lucy, a 19-year old American spending a summer with friends in Tuscany, Tyler never appears to be distressed, not even as Bertolucci's camera languishes over her body as if his film were a series of product shots. Bertolucci chose Tyler for the role after meeting with a number of young girls in Los Angeles, including Liv's music-video co-star Alicia Silverstone. But Bertolucci claims "there was something missing in all of them." What he saw in Liv was a certain gravitas, "a New York aura." A movie, Bertolucci explains, "is a trip inside a person. The actor has to have some mystery for me, has to make me curious, and having Liv was like having an identity in search of itself."

What Bertolucci did not know when he cast the then 17-year-old Manhattanite was how uncannily her own journey had mirrored Lucy's. In the film Lucy discovers that her real father is not the man who brought her up. Tyler, at age 11, discovered the same thing at an Aerosmith concert. The daughter of '70s model and celebrity groupie Bebe Buell, Liv claims she realized that Steven Tyler was her father just by looking at him (for one thing, the two share a Mick Jagger-like mouth). Until then she had grown up thinking her dad was Todd Rundgren, the rocker Buell became involved with again after she and Tyler split up over his drug addiction.

Liv wanted to separate herself from Lucy during the filming of Stealing Beauty. "I tried my damnedest not to think of my own situation," she says, "but at one point, after a take, I just started to cry and cry. I remembered when I found out about my dad and how we just stared at each other from head to toe taking in every nook and cranny."

Dad and daughter have developed a close rapport over the years, and Pop believes Liv won out with more than just his lips. "What she inherited from me was just the great art of being herself," observes the not quite ageless rock star. "She's literally out of the egg with wet on her ears. She really doesn't want to become this other thing they want her to become. I think that's what Bertolucci fell in love with, and that's why he's so in her face with his camera."

By the time she was 14 she had been pursued by a number of modeling agencies, quickly making the leap to model-turned-actress when an agent discovered her in a New York Times article about children of the famous. A short while later, she landed her first role, the older sister of an autistic boy in the little seen, little praised Bruce Beresford drama Silent Fall.

Right now Liv Tyler has no idea what sort of project she'll tackle next. But she knows she has to move beyond the world of bedazzling enchantresses. (For one thing she isn't thrilled about nude scenes. "It's hard enough to show your lover your body parts," she says, "let alone the world.") Bertolucci thinks Liv could be "important, if she chooses her roles carefully." Tyler believes that when she is older and has "read more books" she'll have a better idea of the sort of projects she should pursue.

As for her immediate concerns, they do not revolve around becoming the next Emma Thompson. Last week Tyler became a godmother to Ella Rose Richards, granddaughter of Keith, whom she knows through her family. And after months working in California. she is eager to spend some down time "with myself" in New York City. "I can't wait for someone to honk at me and tell me to f--- off," she says, "to be just one out of a million." Fat chance.

--With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles