CINEMA: LIVING IT UP!

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."