Courtney Michelle Love (née Harrison; born July 9, 1964) is an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, and actress. A figure in the alternative and grunge scenes of the 1990s, Love has had a career spanning four decades. She rose to prominence as the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the alternative rock band Hole, which she formed in 1989. Love has drawn public attention for her uninhibited live performances and confrontational lyrics, as well as her highly publicized personal life following her marriage to the Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.
Love had an itinerant childhood, but was primarily raised in Portland, Oregon, where she played in a series of short-lived bands and was active in the local punk scene. After briefly being in a juvenile hall, she spent a year living in Dublin and Liverpool before returning to the United States and pursuing an acting career. She appeared in supporting roles in the Alex Cox films Sid and Nancy (1986) and Straight to Hell (1987) before forming the band Hole in Los Angeles with guitarist Eric Erlandson. The group received critical acclaim from underground rock press for their 1991 debut album Pretty on the Inside, produced by Kim Gordon, while their second release, Live Through This (1994), was met with critical accolades and multi-platinum sales. In 1995, Love returned to acting, earning a Golden Globe Award nomination for her performance as Althea Leasure in Miloš Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), which established her as a mainstream actress. The following year, Hole's third album, Celebrity Skin (1998), was nominated for three Grammy Awards.
Love continued to work as an actress into the early 2000s, appearing in big-budget pictures such as Man on the Moon (1999) and Trapped (2002), before releasing her first solo album, America's Sweetheart, in 2004. The subsequent several years were marred with publicity surrounding Love's legal troubles and drug relapse, which resulted in a mandatory lockdown rehabilitation sentence in 2005 while she was writing a second solo album. That project became Nobody's Daughter, released in 2010 as a Hole album but without the former Hole lineup. Between 2014 and 2015, Love released two solo singles and returned to acting in the network series Sons of Anarchy and Empire.
Life and career
1964–1982: Childhood and education Courtney Michelle Harrison was born July 9, 1964, at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, the first child of psychotherapist Linda Carroll ( Risi) and Hank Harrison, a publisher and road manager for the Grateful Dead. Her parents met at a party held for Dizzy Gillespie in 1963, and the two married in Reno, Nevada, after Carroll discovered she was pregnant. Carroll, who was adopted at birth, is the biological daughter of novelist Paula Fox. The identity of Love's maternal biological grandfather is unknown. Her matrilineal great-grandparents were screenwriters Elsie Fox (née de Sola de Carvajal), a Cuban immigrant, and Paul Hervey Fox. Phil Lesh, the founding bassist of the Grateful Dead, was Love's godfather. According to Love, she was named after Courtney Farrell, the protagonist of Pamela Moore's 1956 novel Chocolates for Breakfast. Love is of mixed Cuban, English, Welsh, Irish, Ashkenazi Jewish, and German ancestry. She was baptized a Roman Catholic. Through her mother's subsequent marriages, she has two younger half-sisters, three younger half-brothers (one of whom died in infancy), and one adopted brother.
In 1970, Love's parents divorced after her mother and one of her father's girlfriends testified that Hank dosed her with LSD when she was a toddler. Carroll also alleged that Hank threatened to abduct his daughter and flee with her to a foreign country. Though Hank denied these allegations, his custody was revoked. Carroll relocated with Love to Oregon, residing in Marcola while completing a psychology degree at the University of Oregon. There, Carroll married schoolteacher Frank Rodríguez, who legally adopted Love. Love attended a Montessori school in Eugene, where she struggled academically and socially. She has said that she began seeing psychiatrists at "like, [age] three. Observational therapy. TM for tots. You name it, I've been there." At age nine, a psychologist noted that she exhibited signs of autism, among them tactile defensiveness and nonverbal behavior.
In 1972, Love's mother divorced Rodríguez, remarried to sportswriter David Menely, and moved the family to Nelson, New Zealand. Love was enrolled at Nelson College for Girls, but soon expelled for misbehavior. In 1973, Carroll sent Love back to Portland, Oregon, where she was raised by her former stepfather and other family friends. At age 14, Love was arrested for shoplifting from a Woolworth store at Lloyd Center and remanded at Hillcrest Correctional Facility, a juvenile hall in Salem, Oregon. While at Hillcrest, she became acquainted with records by Patti Smith, the Runaways, and the Pretenders. She was intermittently placed in foster care throughout late 1979 until becoming legally emancipated in 1980, after which she remained staunchly estranged from her mother.
After her emancipation, Love spent two months in Japan working as a topless dancer, but was deported after her passport was confiscated. She returned to Portland, working as a DJ at a gay disco and a dancer at Mary's Club, adopting the surname Love to conceal her identity; she later adopted Love as her surname. Love said she lacked social skills as a teenager, and learned them while frequenting gay clubs and spending time with drag queens. During this period, she briefly enrolled at Portland State University, studying English and philosophy. She later commented that, had she not found a passion for music, she would have sought a career working with children.
In 1981, Love was granted a small trust fund that had been left by her maternal grandparents. She used that money to travel to Dublin, Ireland, where her biological father was living, and audited theology courses at Trinity College. She later received honorary patronage from Trinity's University Philosophical Society in 2010. While in Dublin, Love met musician Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes at one of the band's concerts. Cope took a liking to Love and eventually allowed her and a friend to stay at his Liverpool home in his absence. Cope's roommate, musician Pete de Freitas, was initially hesitant to allow the girls to stay, but acquiesced as they were "alarmingly young and obviously had nowhere else to go". Cope writes of Love frequently in his 1994 autobiography, Head-On, in which he refers to her as "the adolescent".
In July 1982, Love returned to the United States. In late 1982, she attended a Faith No More concert in San Francisco and convinced the members to let her join as a singer. The group recorded material with Love as a vocalist, but fired her; according to keyboardist Roddy Bottum, who remained Love's friend in the years after, the band wanted a "male energy".
Love returned to working abroad as an erotic dancer, briefly in Taiwan, and then at a taxi dance hall in Hong Kong. By Love's account, she first used heroin while working at the Hong Kong dance hall, having mistaken it for cocaine. While still intoxicated, Love was pursued by a wealthy male client who requested that she return with him to the Philippines, and gave her money to purchase new clothes. She used the money to purchase an airfare back to the United States.
1983–1987: Early music projects and film At age 19, through her then-boyfriend's mother, film costume designer Bernadene Mann, Love took a job at Paramount Studios cleaning out the wardrobe department of vintage pieces that had suffered dry rot or other damage. During this time, Love became interested in vintage fashion. She subsequently returned to Portland, where she formed short-lived musical projects with her friends Ursula Wehr and Robin Barbur (namely Sugar Babylon, later known as Sugar Babydoll). Love briefly fronted Faith No More for their first TV appearance in 1984: she sang with a Siouxsie Sioux-style vocal. After meeting Kat Bjelland at the Satyricon nightclub in 1984, the two formed the group the Pagan Babies. Love asked Bjelland to start the band with her as a guitarist, and the two moved to San Francisco in June 1985, where they recruited bassist Jennifer Finch and drummer Janis Tanaka. According to Bjelland, "[Courtney] didn't play an instrument at the time" aside from keyboards, so Bjelland would transcribe Love's musical ideas on guitar for her. The group played several house shows and recorded one 4-track demo before disbanding in late 1985. After Pagan Babies, Love moved to Minneapolis, where Bjelland had formed the group Babes in Toyland, and briefly worked as a concert promoter before returning to California.
Deciding to shift her focus to acting, Love enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute and studied film under experimental director George Kuchar, featuring in one of his short films, Club Vatican. She also took experimental theater courses in Oakland taught by Whoopi Goldberg. Love has stated that she underwent a rhinoplasty at age 20, and that she felt the procedure helped advance her career.
In 1985, she submitted an audition tape for the role of Nancy Spungen in the Sid Vicious biopic Sid and Nancy (1986) and was given a minor supporting role by director Alex Cox. After filming Sid and Nancy in New York City, she worked at a peep show in Times Square and squatted at the ABC No Rio social center and Pyramid Club in the East Village. That year, Cox cast her in a leading role in his film Straight to Hell (1987), a Spaghetti Western starring Joe Strummer, Dennis Hopper, and Grace Jones, shot in Spain in 1986. The film was poorly reviewed by critics, but it caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who featured Love in an episode of Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes. She also had a part in the 1988 Ramones music video for "I Wanna Be Sedated", appearing as a bride among dozens of party guests.
Displeased by the "celebutante" fame she had attained, Love abandoned her acting career in 1988 and resumed work as a stripper in Oregon, where she was recognized by customers at a bar in the small town of McMinnville. This prompted Love to go into isolation and relocate to Anchorage, Alaska, where she lived for three months to "gather her thoughts", supporting herself by working at a strip club frequented by local fishermen. "I decided to move to Alaska because I needed to get my shit together and learn how to work", she said in retrospect. "So I went on this sort of vision quest. I got rid of all my earthly possessions. I had my bad little strip clothes and some big sweaters, and I moved into a trailer with a bunch of other strippers."
1988–1991: Beginnings of Hole
In late 1988, Love taught herself to play guitar and relocated to Los Angeles, where she placed an ad in a local music zine: "I want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac." By 1989, Love had recruited guitarist Eric Erlandson; bassist Lisa Roberts, her neighbor; and drummer Caroline Rue, whom she met at a Gwar concert. Love named the band Hole after a line from Euripides' Medea ("There is a hole that pierces right through me") and a conversation in which her mother told her that she could not live her life "with a hole running through her". On July 23, 1989, Love married Leaving Trains vocalist James Moreland in Las Vegas; the marriage was annulled the same year. She later said that Moreland was a transvestite and that they had married "as a joke". After forming Hole, Love and Erlandson had a romantic relationship that lasted over a year.