Non-headbangers may have been unaware of Love until the suicide of her husband, grunge rock king Kurt Cobain, in 1994: she seemed unable to tend to herself or their baby daughter and admitted using drugs to cope. Yet, Love was a major rock star in her own right, having formed the group Hole in 1989. In 1994, she was one of the subjects of the MTV documentary special "24 Hours in Rock 'n Roll" and in 1995 was sufficiently mainstream for Barbara Walters to proclaim her one of the "The 10 Most Fascinating People of 1995" in an ABC special.
Love is a product of the hippie era. Her father, Hank Harrison, was a disciple of (and for a short time the manager of) The Grateful Dead, and her mother, Linda Carroll, a therapist best-known as the woman who in 1993 convinced radical fugitive Katherine Ann Power to surrender to authorities after more than two decades on the run. Yet, Love's childhood was not all flower power. Born Love Michelle Harrison, she was still a baby when her parents divorced. By court order, her father was not allowed to see her unsupervised until she became an adult. Love's mother remarried and changed her daughter's name to Courtney Michelle. Love bounced between New Zealand and the US, from guardian to guardian. By the time she was 13, Love, who had begun to shoplift, was sent to reform school.
From then on, she was on her own, surviving on a trust fund, traveling the world and finding employment as a stripper in Japan, Taiwan, and Alaska and singing with various bands, including Sugar Baby Doll and Faith No More. Love drifted into films and TV via the extra route (the 1985 film "Brewster's Millions," among others). She auditioned for the female title role in Alex Cox's "Sid and Nancy" (1986), but was cast in the smaller role of Nancy Spungen's friend Gretchen. Love also played the bitchy sexpot Velma in Cox's "Straight to Hell" (1987), a film generally considered unwatchable by most critics.
Love entered the world of grunge rock in 1989, forming Hole and devoting herself to music. Among her albums were "Rat Bastard" (1990), "Pretty on the Inside" (1991), the critically acclaimed "Live Through This" (1994), and "Ask for It" (1995). By 1995, she was one of four subjects of the documentary "Not Bad for a Girl", which focused on women in rock'n'roll. Also that year, she served as executive music coordinator of the rock score for the feature "Tank Girl," billed as Courtney Love-Cobain.
Love's foul-mouthed, drugged-out and lipstick-smeared persona failed to endear her to the general public, even after she became The Widow Cobain. But her performance in "The People vs. Larry Flynt" turned peoples' heads and finally gained her a modicum of professional respect. Cast as the bisexual junkie stripper Althea Leisure over more established actresses (reportedly including Oscar-winner Mira Sorvino), Love faced additional hurdles, including weekly drug testing. Director Forman and co-star Woody Harrelson also contributed to defray the cost of insuring the novice performer. Love more than justified their faith by delivering one of the year's acclaimed performance. While some disputed the merits of the picture, nearly all praised her charismatic, sharply-detailed turn which earned her citations from the New York and Boston critics.
Love also appeared in two other small roles in 1996, playing a waitress opposite Keanu Reeves in "Feeling Minnesota" and the colorful character Big Pink in Julian Schnabel's "Basquiat." After a brief role in the ensemble of "200 Cigarettes", Love could be seen essaying another real-life person, film editor Lynn Margulies, in Forman's "Man on the Moon" (both 1999), the biopic of comic actor Andy Kaufman in which she gave Forman another winning perfomance, (if not as incindiery as their first collaboration). Over the next few years, Love found herself embroiled in several personal disputes, both with her record company and the former members of Nirvana. The now-familiar drama surrounding her life continued to gain her critics and fans alike. Other artists supported her stance on standing up for musician's rights while the Nirvana band members publically declared her insane in their battle of the right to Cobain's music. She continued her acting career, despite the turmoil in her life and appeared in the well-received independent film "Julie Johnson" opposite Lili Taylor in 2001.
In 2002, she had a starring role in the little-seen action drama "Trapped," where she played a kidnapper opposite Kevin Bacon, but the media was more firmly focused on the singer-actress' increasingly more notorious personal exploits than on her career (which was sliding back into its earlier, stunt-filled stage with gigs like a purposefully provocative all-day hosting of the video music channel MTV2): in late 2002 she was named as a possible patient of her friend Winona Ryder's physician, who lost his medical license for illegally dispensing perscription medicine; in early 2003 she was detained on a Virgin airlines flight for allegedly abusing the flight crew, but no formal charges were filed; later that same year Love was arrested after attempting to break into a Los Angeles home reportedly owned by her then-boyfriend/manager while under the influence of an unspecified intoxicant, and, shortly after being released on bail that night, was the subject of a Beverly Hills emergency call were she was rushed to the hospital after what was widely reported as a possible drug overdose. Appearing increasingly erratic and slurred in her public appearances--Love's constant breast-flashing while guesting on David Letterman's talk show in 2004 was more distrubing than erotic, and she appeared to be a semi-lucid train wreck on the panel of a 2005 Comedy Central roast of her friend Pamela Anderson despite constant declarations that she'd been sober for a year--the rocker continued to travel a rocky road: in 2004 she was arrested again--twice: for assualting a woman in her ex-boyfriend's home with a beer bottle, and for disorderly conduct after allegedly striking a concert-goer in the head with a microphone; she only barely won a hard-fought bid to retain custody of her daughter; she faced lawsuits, leins and tax audits from her former legal team, travel agents, her condo board and the state of California; and a highly publicized 2005 fainting spell at a Hollywood hot spot which saw her rushed into an emergency room. The latter event in particular prompted a Los Angeles court to order her into rehab for 28 days after it was deemed that she had violated her probation by allegedly relapsing into drug use. She was ultimately sentenced to 180 days in county jail for violating her probation in three criminal cases. However, a judge ruled that the singer could serve her time at a live-in chemical dependency program and in 2006 ended Love's house arrest for drug-related probation violations, saying she had put her "gnarly drug problem" behind her.