Courtney Love

According to Love, she was named after Courtney Farrell, the protagonist of Pamela Moore's 1956 novel Chocolates for Breakfast.

Love is of Cuban, English, German, Irish, Ashkenazi Jewish, and Welsh descent.

Through her mother's subsequent marriages, Love has two younger half-sisters, three younger half-brothers (one of whom died in infancy), and one adopted brother.

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.

Love's matrilineal great-grandmother was Elsie Fox (née de Sola), a Cuban writer who co-wrote the film The Last Train from Madrid with Love's great-grandfather, Paul Hervey Fox, cousin of writer Faith Baldwin and actor Douglas Fairbanks.

Phil Lesh, the founding bassist of the Grateful Dead, is Love's godfather.

Courtney Michelle Love (née Harrison; born July 9, 1964) is an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, and actress.

Courtney Michelle Harrison was born July 9, 1964, at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, California, the first child of psychotherapist Linda Carroll (née Risi; born 1944) and Hank Harrison (1941–2022), a publisher and road manager for the Grateful Dead.

Love spent her early years in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, until her parents divorced in 1970.

In a custody hearing, her mother, as well as one of her father's girlfriends, testified that Hank had dosed Courtney 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Though Hank denied these allegations, his custody was revoked.

In 1970, Carroll relocated with Love to the rural community of Marcola, Oregon where they lived along the Mohawk River while Carroll completed her psychology degree at the University of Oregon.

There, Carroll remarried to schoolteacher Frank Rodríguez, who legally adopted Love.

Though Love was baptized a Roman Catholic, her mother maintained an unorthodox home; according to Love, "There were hairy, wangly-ass hippies running around naked [doing] Gestalt therapy", and her mother raised her in a gender-free household with "no dresses, no patent leather shoes, no canopy beds, nothing".

Love attended a Montessori school in Eugene, Oregon, 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.

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, to be raised by her former stepfather and other family friends.

At age 14, Love was arrested for shoplifting from a Portland department store and remanded at Hillcrest Correctional Facility, a juvenile hall in Salem, Oregon.

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.

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 Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.

A figure in the alternative and grunge scenes of the 1990s, her career has spanned four decades.

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.

Love commented in 1995: "When I talk about being introverted, I was diagnosed autistic. At an early age, I would not speak. Then I simply bloomed."

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.

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 (2006).

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.

In 2020, NME named her one of the most influential singers in alternative culture of the last 30 years.

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.

In 2020, she confirmed she was writing new music.