Liv Tyler was around 11 years old when she looked at the poster of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler on her bedroom wall and came to a realization that would rock her entire existence. “My mom has a diary entry or something where I wrote, ‘I think Steven is my father,’” the Lord of the Rings actor later explained.
Soon afterward, she confronted her mother, model and musician Bebe Buell, at an August 1988 concert and discovered her suspicion was correct. Liv, now 47, shared new details of that conversation and her first meeting with half-sister, Mia Tyler, on a recent episode of the Sibling Revelry podcast.
Up until that fateful night, Liv believed Utopia singer Todd Rundgren was her biological father. Buell, who was the Miss November 1974 Playboy Playmate, had a brief romantic fling with Steven in late 1976, which ultimately resulted in their daughter’s birth in New York City the following July. Despite knowing there was a chance he wasn’t Liv’s father, Rundgren signed her birth certificate, gave her his last name, and stepped in to raise her as his own.
Buell decided to keep the paternity a secret from Liv because of Steven’s reported drug addiction at the time. Buell said she and Rundgren “made a pact that he would be Liv’s father, and if it ever became an issue, we’d tell her at 18.” As it turned out, Liv unraveled the mystery much earlier.
Liv Tyler confronted her mother at an Aerosmith concert
Liv first met Steven when she was around 8 or 9 years old at one of Rundgren’s concerts and recalled him buying her a Shirley Temple (named for the popular child actor) at the bar.
Liv didn’t know it at the time, but the meeting wasn’t a coincidence. As she explained to Sibling Revelry hosts Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson, Steven had arranged to reconnect with Buell as part of his 12-step recovery program after rehab.
Despite having “no idea who he was,” Liv said she “fell madly in love” with Steven and would talk to posters of him she had bought. “It must be chemical somehow—DNA and genes,” Liv explained. “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.”
Then in August 1988, Liv and her mother attended an Aerosmith and Guns N’ Roses concert at the Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts in Mansfield, Massachusetts. While there, she noticed her uncanny resemblance to a girl she had been hanging out with backstage. That girl was Mia, Tyler’s daughter with his second wife, actor Cyrinda Foxe. “I looked and I was like, ‘Wait, that’s me!’ It was really weird. It was literally like looking in the mirror, seeing your double,” Liv told Sibling Revelry, noting they even had similar hairstyles and sneakers.
That’s when the parental connection fully clicked. “I looked at my mom, and I was like, ‘Mom?’ And she just started crying. My mom just like, bawled. And I was like, ‘Is Steven my dad?’” Liv recalled. Buell took her to a bench outside the venue and finally revealed the truth about Steven’s paternity and her pact with Rundgren.
After discovering the truth, Liv a began fostering a father-daughter relationship with Steven, and she eventually changed her last name from Rundgren to Tyler. When she was in high school, Liv appeared alongside Alicia Silverstone in Aerosmith’s 1994 “Crazy” music video, and they teamed up again professionally in 1998 when Steven’s band contributed the rock ballad “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” to her movie Armageddon.
Liv considers both Rundgren and Tyler her father
Buell and Rundgren eventually split, though he still remained involved in Liv’s life. She explained that she grew up with “a nice, eclectic mix of parental figures,” spending her childhood living between the homes of her mother, her grandmother (etiquette expert Dorothea Johnson), as well as with her aunt, uncle, and cousins in Maine.
Now, she considers both Rundgren and the Aerosmith singer to be her fathers. “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,’” she said, adding she frequently visited Rundgren at Woodstock in the ’80s. “Although he and my mom weren’t together, he was always a very stable, loving force in my life.”
Liv holds no ill will toward Buell for keeping the secret from her either. “It’s quite an emotional story, honestly, the whole thing,” she shared in 2015. “My mother was very young when she had me, and there was a little bit of confusion about where I came from, but I was very loved and very well taken care of by all my family, which was wonderful.”
Steven was even in the room when Liv gave birth to one of her sons
Steven’s also been an active part in the lives of Liv’s children: Milo (with ex-husband, Royston Langdon) as well as Sailor and Lula (with British sports agent Dave Gardner). In fact, Steven and Mia were present when Sailor was born six weeks early in 2015 and Gardner was on a flight.
“I never expected to give birth with my sister and my dad in the room,” she shared. “I called Mia, and she came straight to the hospital, and she also called Steven. He walked into the room moments before Sailor was born and cut his umbilical cord. It was wild.”
Although her kids are close to all their grandparents, she said Steven isn’t a typical grandfather: “He’s very sweet, it’s just so fun for him, for all the grandparents to get to play. He’s amazing at making weird noises with his mouth, animal noises, a lot of animal noises!
“He’s very playful and funny and lovely. He’s kind of like a magical wizard. He has things in his hair and all sorts of jewelry, and he’s just very fun.”
Steven and Aerosmith are now retired from touring after the singer suffered a vocal injury in 2023 that rendered him unable to perform. However, the band’s role in starting his relationship with Liv remains an intriguing part of their legacy.
