For years, actress Liv Tyler had no idea one of the world’s most famous rock stars was actually her father.
The Lord of the Rings alum believed a music producer named Todd Rundgren was her biological father until she was 10. It took a chance encounter, a little tenacity and a youthful obsession with Aerosmith to learn the truth.
Liv’s mother, former Playboy playmate Bebe Buell, had her partner Rundgren sign Liv’s birth certificate to authenticate his paternity. But after her 10th birthday, everything changed.
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Liv used to look up at the Aerosmith poster on her bedroom wall and wonder if Steven Tyler, the lead singer of the legendary US rock group, was actually her biological dad.
According to an interview in Far Out Magazine, Liv says she finally exposed the truth in when she was 10 in the late 1980s.
“My mum has a diary entry or something where I wrote, ‘I think Steven is my father,” Liv recalled to the publication in 2022.
[Todd and I] made a pact that he would be Liv’s father and if it ever became an issue, we’d tell her at 18The Hollywood actress had actually met her real father two years earlier at a concert Rundgren was performing at. By chance, Steven was sitting at the bar and he bought his biological daughter a Shirley Temple.
Liv would later recall falling “madly in love” with the Aerosmith rocker, not realising he was her father.
“It was a moment that was bigger than me,” she told The Guardian in 2017. “It was almost spiritual. When you meet kin, there is an energy and sparkle between your bodies. It must be chemical somehow – DNA and genes.
“I felt a connection in a very strong way when I met him as a little girl and I didn’t know why at first, but I figured it out rather quickly.”
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Liv’s suspicions only grew stronger when she met Mia Tayler, her half-sister who was Steven’s daughter with Cyrinda Foxe. She said it was “literally like looking at my twin”.
“I saw her standing on the side of the stage at a concert, but it was literally like looking at my twin… she looked exactly like me,” Liv explained on The Jonathan Ross Show in 2016.
“I looked at my mum and she had tears in her eyes and I kind of put it all together.”
Armed with the evidence, Liv confronted her mother in the late ’80s and shared her doubts over her true parentage. Buell was forced to tell Liv she was indeed correct: Steven was her biological father.
Buell and Steven had a short fling in 1976, which resulted in the model falling pregnant with her first child, Liv. She gave birth to Liv in 1977.
At the time, the Dream On singer was deep in his drug addiction and Buell wanted to protect her daughter by keeping her true paternity a secret.
“[Todd and I] made a pact that he would be Liv’s father and if it ever became an issue, we’d tell her at 18,” Buell later revealed, according to Biography.
After Liv and Steven’s bond was confirmed to be familial, the father-daughter duo began regarding each other as such. She even starred in the 1993 music video for Aerosmith’s song Crazy.
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The actress, who would go on to become famous in her own right with films such as Armageddon and Jersey Girl, also remained close with Rundgren.
Liv said of Rundgren to The Guardian: “I’m so grateful to Todd for choosing to be a father figure to me.”
“It’s a big thing for a man to say, ‘I know this kid might not be mine, but I still want to be her father.”
Over three decades on from her paternity quest, Liv and Steven remain close and he is an active grandfather to her children.
Liv, now 45, often speaks openly about her two father figures and never shies away from the bizarre way she learned about her true parentage.
She also forgave her mother and Rundgren for concealing the truth for all those years.
“I have more empathy for my parents now,” Liv told The UK Telegraph in 2008. “As a child I didn’t understand why that would happen – how that could happen.
“Everybody had a different interpretation [of the situation] and how they participated. And you know what? I’m OK with that.”
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