Courtney Love

Courtney Love biography

Courtney Michelle Love (born Courtney Michelle Harrison; July 9, 1964) is an American singer-songwriter, actress, and artist. Love is the lead vocalist, lyricist, and rhythm guitarist for alternative rock band Hole, which she formed in 1989, and is also an actress who moved from bit parts in Alex Cox films to significant and acclaimed roles in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) and Man on the Moon (1999).

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."

Originally influenced by noise rock and no wave acts, her band Hole went on to release several successful albums in the 1990s, most notably Live Through This (1994) and Celebrity Skin (1998). Love also popularized the fashion style "kinderwhore", characterized by torn babydoll dresses and smeared red lipstick, and received intense media attention over her 1992 marriage to Kurt Cobain, before and after his 1994 suicide. She would later gain recognition as an actress for her award-nominated performance in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), and she continued to occasionally star in films. Love had a brief solo career, releasing America's Sweetheart (2004), and was the subject of much media attention for various drug and legal issues in the following year. In 2006, Love was sentenced to six months of lock-down rehab and achieved sobriety thereafter. In 2009, Love re-emerged and reformed Hole with new members, releasing a fourth album, Nobody's Daughter (2010).

Early life

Courtney Michelle Harrison was born in 1964 in San Francisco, California, to Linda Carroll, a psychotherapist, and Hank Harrison, a publisher who had some association with the Grateful Dead; at five years old, Love was included in a group picture on the back of the band's third album, Aoxomoxoa (1969). Her parents divorced in 1969, with custody being awarded to Carroll after she alleged that Harrison had fed LSD to Love when she was three years old, an allegation which he denied. Carroll then remarried, eventually giving birth to two more daughters and adopting a son. Harrison at some point claimed to be the granddaughter of Marlon Brando.

Love had a nomadic and troubled childhood. She moved with her family to Marcola, Oregon in 1970, and then briefly lived in New Zealand before being sent back to live with her stepfather in Oregon. According to the Oregon's Children's Services Division, Love was then moved to over 20 different facilities and foster homes between 1978 and 1980. and briefly as a DJ at Portland's community radio station, KBOO. She also took job opportunities working briefly at dance halls in Japan and Taiwan, and wrote missives under the name "Courtney Michelle" in punk-zine Maximumrocknroll on local Portland bands Poison Idea and Rancid Vat.

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