JERUSALEM, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni heads the centrist Kadima party, which narrowly led exit polls in Israel's parliamentary election on Tuesday.

Here are key facts about Livni:

* Livni was born in the coastal city of Tel Aviv on July 8, 1958. Her father the late Eitan Livni, served in parliament with the right-wing Likud party, after prominent service in a guerrilla movement that fought British rule in Palestine in the 1940s. She and husband businessman Naftali Spitzer have two adult sons. The family lives in Tel Aviv.

* After four years with the Mossad intelligence agency, Livni studied law at a university near Tel Aviv and worked as a corporate lawyer for a decade before her 1999 election to parliament with the Likud. She has served consecutively in Israeli cabinets since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon first named her in 2001, and climbed the ranks as one of his confidantes.

* Livni, the most powerful woman in Israeli politics since Prime Minister Golda Meir in the 1970s, has headed half a dozen ministries, including justice, immigration and currently, foreign affairs, where she has stewarded U.S.-brokered peace talks with Palestinians. In 2005, she joined Sharon in breaking ranks with Likud to found the centrist Kadima party, in a dispute over Sharon's decision to pull troops from Gaza.

* Livni has latterly embraced Washington's strategy of achieving a two-state solution with the Palestinians, breaking with her father's support of a greater state of Israel, stretching from the sea to east of the Jordan river. She was also one of the key Israeli decision-makers behind two recent wars, the 2006 Lebanon campaign against Hezbollah and a 22-day offensive against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip last month.

* After succeeding outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as head of Kadima in September, when he resigned in a corruption probe, Livni failed to forge a new coalition government due to a dispute with a religious party, which forced Israel to hold a national election more than a year ahead of schedule. (Jerusalem newsroom, Editing by Angus MacSwan) (For blogs and links on Israeli politics and other Israeli and Palestinian news, go to http://blogs.reuters.com/axismundi)

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