The Biography Channel - Courtney Love Biography

Courtney Love has long been one of the most volatile, violent and litigious performers in Hollywood. A punk rocker, actress, and widow of rock legend Kurt Cobain.

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Courtney Love
born: 09-08-1964
birth place: San Francisco, USA

Of course, the media went into a frenzy and major record labels suddenly began to take more serious notice of Love’s music career. Rumours started to circulate quickly of Love and Cobain’s supposed drug antics though - even while Love was pregnant with Frances. Accordingly, social services began to investigate the duo but Frances was not taken away from her parents.

Love’s joint drug abuse with her husband began to accelerate at a rapid pace, culminating in the tragic events of 8th April 1984 when Cobain, deeply depressed, committed suicide using a shotgun to his head. His death confirmed the suicide and Love made the brave and public step of reading out his tragic last words to hoards of distressed fans at his memorial service a few days later.

Cobain’s suicide came just four days before Hole’s first huge commercial album release - Live Through This and while grieving for her husband, Love was then forced to endure more emotional torment when Hole’s bassist Kristen Pfaff overdosed on heroin and died just two months later.

Rumours circulated that Cobain had co-written a large part of Hole’s second album but Love vehemently denied this. To protect the band and Cobain’s name, Love maintained a fairly professional relationship with the remaining Nirvana band mates and formed a partnership with them in 1997 called Nirvana LLC which would control all Nirvana related releases and try and protect the interests of all parties. However, the relations between Love and the group eventually became strained and by 2001, Love sought to terminate the company.

Not one to sit back and crumble, Love picked herself up and recruited a new replacement for Pfaff before touring with Hole internationally in 1995, appearing at worldwide festivals including Reading. Live Through This had become a critical success and by April 1995, it had gone platinum.

Love hadn’t forgotten her somewhat unimpressionable acting career and took a part playing the wife of Larry Flynt in The People Vs. Larry Flynt, opposite Woody Harrelson in 1996. Hole’s performance won great acclaim and earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress.

Meanwhile, Hole released their third album, Celebrity Skin, in 1998 which managed to garner the same amount of fan interest as her previous release as it went multi-platinum in the charts.

The band went on a world tour again to promote the album, ending back in America with a co-headline set of gigs with Marilyn Manson. The collaboration didn’t gel well and Hole dropped out, citing no animosity but stating that they had to pay 50% of Manson’s stage costs as the sole reason.

Hole’s fame may have been at the level Love desired but after giving a speech at the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference in 2000, she branded the recording contract system corrupt and was famously quoted as saying the band "may as well be working at a 7-Eleven."

Love had begun to lose interest in Hole by 2001 and formed the short-lived all-female punk rock band Bastard. A demo was completed but amounted to nothing after conflicts between Love and the bassist Gina Crosley. In May 2002, Hole announced that they were splitting up and it was time for Love to go it alone.