Liv and Kicking; ;

Good looks, a successful career and a rock star for a dad - actress Liv Tyler seems to have it all. Yet the former model says she still has much to learn but, she tells Geoffrey MacNab, that doesn't include gutting fish Most kids trying to break away from their dull family background will seek pleasure in the seething cities, get royally wasted under a neon sky in an anonymous metropolis, turn their back on suburban life and aim for the stars even if they usually end up on the same 9-5 treadmill as their parents. But if your dad is a rock star, your mum is one of the most celebrated groupies of all time and your step-dad is er another rock star, then hedonism and glamour is conformity not rebellion. For Liv Tyler, striking out on her own has more to do with carving catfish than chopping out lines of coke.

Tyler stars opposite Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Chris O'Donnell and Charles Dutton in Cookie's Fortune, a lighthearted thriller from maverick American director, Robert Altman. Set in a small Mississippi town, the role required Tyler to role her sleeves up and get involved in some practical research which would have even the most hardened method actor struggling to keep their dinner down. Specifically, Altman wanted her to learn to gut catfish, the proposed occupation of her character, Emma Duvall.

"I had this vision of my character being a sushi chef,'' she recalls. "Stephen Altman, who is Bob's son and does the production design, drove me out to this shack in the middle of the woods where this guy lived. It was his house and where he cleaned catfish."

But when Tyler realised what the procedure involved, she couldn't even bear to go in. "First of all, they are alive. There's this whole process. They take giant toenail clippers and clip the fins. They skin them alive. It's really hard to do. You have to be really strong. I found it really disturbing and I said, 'Bob we need to talk'." Several days of vociferous protest later and Altman relented. Instead of chopping the catfish, Emma became a packager and deliverer of them instead.

In this tale about a lovable grandmother who is apparently murdered by her caretaker, Tyler plays Emma Duvall, a gawky young renegade who dresses as if she is auditioning for a part as a sharecropper in a Depression-era drama. Emma slugs back copious quantities of Wild Turkey and processes her catfish under the supervision of a lecherous boss, played by Lyle Lovett. It isn't exactly a glamourous role, but Tyler has had her fill of glamour. Her father, Steve, is the lead-singer of Aerosmith. Her stepfather is Todd Rundgren. Her mother, Bebe Buell, was once - or so endless fading press clippings proclaim - a legendary 'rock chick', rumoured to have had affairs with everybody from Keith Moon to John Lennon.

Slender and coltish with a beguilingly soft voice, the 22-year-old actress belies her family background. Bernardo Bertolucci, the director of Last Tango In Paris, is particularly poetic about Tyler's physical charms. "I was overwhelmed by Liv's erotic impact," he wrote after casting Tyler as the sensuous young lead in Stealing Beauty in 1996. "She was like a landscape with clouds passing over it, changing every few seconds, becoming younger and older." It's exactly the kind of fulsome tribute directors regularly pay her.

As a result, you might expect Tyler, a one-time teenage model, to be a jaded, worldly-wise young brat. Happily, she is no prima donna, but does acknowledge that she remains callow. "I'm trying to educate myself, to keep getting knowledge," she says. This explains her decision to take a year's break from acting after her first big movie roles: "I did that because I knew I needed to grow up and be a human being for a year. I knew that I had been very young in those parts and I could feel a navete about myself which I needed to strengthen but which is just natural being a young woman. It's still there and it probably won't ever go away".

For an ingenue, Tyler is remarkably versatile. She has appeared in huge-budget extravaganzas (Armageddon) and European costume dramas (Plunkett And Macleane), as well as her share of US indies (Heavy and Cookie's Fortune.) She still seems a little bit fazed by the idea of movie stardom. "I'm not Madonna or anything," she protests. "You come to a film festival and there are bodyguards. You're sped around in cars. There are people waiting for you at elevators, but it's not like that most of the time. You have to be grateful you have fans at all."

This attitude leaks over into Tyler's choice of roles. She displays a refreshing willingness to muck in and rise to the challenge of any part, no matter how physically gruelling. She still shivers, for instance, at her memories of a Russian winter. She recently spent four-and-a-half months filming Onegin in the country and paints a forbidding picture of her experiences Martha Fiennes' new screen adaptation of Pushkin's classic 19th century novel.

"It was the most intense four-and-a-half months of my life," she says mournfully of a shoot which took her from St Petersburg in Russia to the UK's Shepperton studios. "It was really heavy material and just constant sadness because of my character. And doing an English accent and being in really constricting corsets all day, with my hair" - she points dramatically towards the ceiling - "up to here ".

Onegin wasn't Tyler's first experience of filming in the intense cold. The shoot for Plunkett and Macleane, where she starred opposite Robert Carlyle, took place in the icy streets of Prague. The two films also required Tyler to attempt an English accent. "That was very difficult," she says. "You have to train your tongue to move very differently." Producing a burst of her best "posh Anglo-Saxon" by way of illustration, she sounds exactly like Eliza Doolittle on a day at the races.

After the constraints of costume drama, working with Altman was a relief and an escape into naturalism. Altman, one of America's greatest directors, has notched up such leftfield classics as M*A*S*H, Nashville and The Player. He is an 'actor's director', famous for letting his cast do more or less as they please and shooting in long takes which allow them to build up a performance.

"Instead of doing 20,000 set-ups, he works so you're always doing the whole scene at any given moment," says Tyler. "Whereas a lot of other directors break down scenes into such little bits that you don't feel you're acting any more."

Tyler is speaking from experience. Her work with Bruce Willis on the apocalyptic effects-driven monstrosity Armageddon may have been lucrative, but Tyler reaped no artistic dividends. "That whole scene at the end with Bruce was one of the most disastrous days of my whole life," she says plaintively. "They'd made a tape of Bruce doing the scene but they hadn't left any pauses for me to speak."

In other words, she was acting opposite fresh air while an enormous crew recorded her smallest movement. Whenever it was her turn to speak, director Michael Bay paused the tape with Willis on it, but the timing invariably went awry. "There were four cameras zooming into me," she complains. "It was so not intimate. I dug holes in my legs I was so mad. I had a really hard time with all that."

At least on one level Armageddon was a family affair. Tyler's father performed most of the songs on the soundtrack. Not that she is much of an Aerosmith fan. Her taste inclines more to the 1960s. "I do wish that I could have been there for the birth of rock 'n' roll. To see the Beatles would have been unbelievable. We've seen it all and done it all now." She's also big on the blues: "When I was kid, 15 or 16, I knew I loved the sound of these old female singers. When I go away on my trips, I take Nina Simone and Billie Holiday".

On the set of Cookie's Fortune, she and Charles Dutton would while away the time between shots by singing blues standards to each other and their scenes together, though spoken, play like musical duets. With his rough bass, you could say that Dutton's character - the Bourbon-guzzling caretaker falsely accused of murdering old heiress Cookie - is the Louis Armstrong to her Etta James.

By this time, it's clear that there is more to Tyler than a great body and the physics-defying lips she has inherited from her father. But she's still keen to scotch the idea that she was ever a pampered catwalk queen.

"I modelled for a year-and-a-half when I was 14," she says. "Everybody called me a supermodel but I hardly did anything apart from teenybopper manuals when I was a kid. I was a baby. I would do it after school. It was pretty shocking because I'd been chubby and had had braces and then suddenly there I was," she pauses before adding in a low, conspiratorial voice. "And it didn't feel very comfortable."

From catwalks to catfish in a few easy steps - things are going swimmingly for Liv Tyler.

Cookie's Fortune opens on August 20, but receives its UK premiere at the Cameo Cinema on August 17 & 18 as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival

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