Courtney Love

Courtney Michelle Love (née Harrison; born July 9, 1964) is an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, and actress. A key figure in the alternative and grunge scenes of the 1990s, her career has spanned four decades. She gained prominence as the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the alternative rock band Hole, which she founded in 1989. Love has drawn public attention for her uninhibited live performances and confrontational lyrics, as well as for the high-profile nature of her personal life, particularly following her marriage to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. In 2020, NME named her one of the most influential singers in alternative culture of the last 30 years.

Born to countercultural parents in San Francisco, 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 a brief stint in 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, produced by Kim Gordon, while their second release, *Live Through This* (1994), was met with critical praise 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 films 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 marked by publicity surrounding Love's legal troubles and drug relapse, which led to 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*. In 2020, she confirmed she was writing new music. Love has also been active as a writer; she co-created and co-wrote three volumes of a manga, *Princess Ai*, between 2004 and 2006, and wrote a memoir, *Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love* (2006).