Courtney Michelle Love (born Courtney Michelle Harrison; 9 July 1964) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, actress and artist. Love initially gained notoriety in the Los Angeles indie rock scene as vocalist and rhythm guitarist of alternative rock band Hole, which she formed in 1989, later receiving international critical and commercial acclaim for their albums Live Through This (1994) and Celebrity Skin (1998). Love had a brief solo career and then re-formed Hole with new members in 2010, a decade after the original band had broken up, and released Nobody's Daughter (2010). Love also had an intermittent acting career, debuting in Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy (1986) and later receiving a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of Althea Flynt in Miloš Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996).
Love, who grew up primarily in Oregon, is the daughter of psychotherapist Linda Carroll, and writer and ex-Grateful Dead manager Hank Harrison. Love was married to Kurt Cobain, frontman of the grunge band Nirvana, with whom she has a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.
Throughout her career, Love's wild stage antics and subversive feminist attitude have polarized audiences and critics, with Rolling Stone once calling her "the most controversial woman in the history of rock."
Courtney Michelle Harrison was born in San Francisco, California to psychotherapist Linda Carroll and Hank Harrison, publisher and brief manager of the Grateful Dead; consequently Love was featured in a group photo on the back cover of the band's album Aoxomoxoa (1969). Love's parents divorced in 1969 and Harrison's custody was withdrawn after Carroll alleged that he had fed LSD to Love. Carroll moved the family to Marcola where they lived on a commune in what Love described as "a teepee". Love struggled in school and was diagnosed as mildly autistic.
Through relationships with two other men, Carroll gave birth to Love's two half-sisters and adopted a son, and later two half-brothers; another male half-sibling of Love's had died in infancy of a heart defect when Love was 10.
In 1972, Carroll moved with her then-husband to New Zealand, and Love was left in Oregon with her former stepfather and various friends. At age 14, she was arrested for shoplifting a t-shirt and was sent to Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility, a juvenile hall in Salem, Oregon. She spent the following several years in and out of foster homes before becoming legally emancipated at age 16. Love moved to Portland, Oregon and lived in the Northwest District, supporting herself by working illegally as a stripper, a DJ, and various odd jobs, and intermittently took classes at Portland State University studying English literature.
In 1981, Love was granted a small trust fund through her adoptive grandparents, which she used to travel to England and Ireland; there, she was accepted into Trinity College due to high test scores, where she studied theology for two semesters. She also became acquainted with musician Julian Cope in Liverpool and moved into his house briefly before returning to the United States. Love has said that she "didn't have a lot of social skills", and that she learned them while frequenting gay clubs with friends.
Love continued to relocate frequently, spending time in Portland and San Francisco (where she briefly studied at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute), and also took stint jobs illegally working at strip clubs in Japan and Taiwan. In 1985, Love sent in an audition tape for the role of Nancy Spungen in the biopic Sid & Nancy (1986), and caught the attention of director Alex Cox, who wrote a small role for her in the film. She was subsequently offered a lead part in his next film, a spaghetti Western titled Straight to Hell (1987), which starred an array of punk rock icons and other well known actors, although the film was poorly received. Love returned to Oregon, and then retreated to Anchorage, Alaska for several months where she returned to stripping to support herself.
Filmography Courtney Love
