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''The thing about Liv,'' observes Hanks, ''is that she's really smart about the choices she's making. At her stage in the business, it's very difficult to say no to whatever comes along, because of all the money, attention, and glamour being thrown at you. But she's saying no to all the right things. This is an extremely well-grounded girl. She's the oldest 18-year-old I've ever encountered.''

''When I first met her,'' Bertolucci remembers, his Italian accent so thick you could ladle it over cannelloni, ''I could not make up my mind about her age. One minute she was 13, a little girl. Another minute she was a femme fatale of 25. It was as if she was moving through different ages. And that was very, very exciting.''

Tyler was less enthused by her first encounter with the legendary director of Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor, and Little Buddha. More like nauseated. ''I was so scared my ears were bright red and my stomach was making noises I never knew it could,'' she says. Still, it was obvious she was born to play the starring role of Lucy. For one thing, there were remarkable biographical similarities to the character, including the fact that like Lucy, Tyler had grown up not knowing who her true father was.

Her mother, Bebe Buell, hooked up with Steven Tyler in 1977, while on the rebound from a five-year relationship with rocker Todd Rundgren. (Buell, a former Ford model and one-time Playmate, apparently got around; ex-beau Elvis Costello even wrote ''Party Girl'' about her.) But after Liv was conceived, Buell took a long look at Aerosmith's better-living-through-chemistry lifestyle and made a beeline back to Rundgren, who briefly took her back and even pretended to be the baby's biological father. It wasn't until Liv was 10 that she discovered the truth, when she met Steven Tyler at one of Rundgren's concerts and they both recognized the striking physical resemblance. It is not a subject she's wild about discussing. ''It's really personal'' is about all she'll say on the matter — except to note that she and her father are now very close and even share the same jeans size (''Size 29, I think,'' reports her dad, who describes their relationship as ''so open and outrageous even I get embarrassed by the things we talk about'').

To hear her tell it, Tyler's early years growing up in Portland, Maine, far from her rock & roll roots, were so utterly conventional they'd make the Waltons look degenerate. ''It was just me and my mother, my aunt, uncle, and two cousins in a big house with a big barn,'' she recalls. ''We'd mow the lawn and run with the cows and slip in the patties and have barbecues.'' Of course, there were occasional rock & roll lapses, like the time she woke up from a nap backstage at a KISS concert, terrified by Gene Simmons' satanic makeup — but then, what kid hasn't experienced that?

In the late '80s, Tyler and her mom moved to New York City (where they still live, along with her stepfather, guitarist Coyote Shivers). It was there, at 14, that Tyler began her brief stint modeling, breaking into the business with the help of family friend Paulina Porizkova. Then, one day, she announced that she'd decided to become an actress. Buell immediately announced that she would be her manager.


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