Courtney was born July 9, 1964, in California. She was born Love Michelle Harrison. Her grandfather, Phil Lesh, was from the Grateful Dead. Hank Harrison, her dad, published a book about the band. She was a beatifically pacific baby. Her memory of life at Dead Central involves "guys in stripy pangs in a circle around me, and my mother telling me to act like spring." When Love was three her parents split. Love and her mother, Linda Carroll, moved to Eugene, Oregon. Love loathes her father, referring to him as "Bio-dad." Her mother was an eminent therapist: When Katherine Anne Power, a 1970s radical fugitive, turned herself in in 1993 after counseling from Carroll. Love phoned a reporter to brag about it.
When Love was a child she would have really bad nightmares. It effected everyone around her. Living in communes, moving around a lot, dressed in drab Birkenstock-era hippie garb, she yearned for frilly dresses and canopy beds. The other kids in school called her "Pee Girl" because her clothes reeked from insufficient washing. A schoolmate recalls Love as a smart, bossy, bratty, manipulative kid. Love has been quoted as saying that she tried to launch her acting career as Snow White in a local play. "And they gave me the part of the Evil Witch. And that's when I was eight."
Love's mother moved to a New Zealand commune to raise sheep. Love was then shuttled between friends' homes, foster homes, and boarding schools. After a fateful bust for shoplifting a Kiss T-shirt she went to reform school in Salem, Oregon. Courtney was frequently sent to "The Quiet Room," a padded detention cell, for trouble making residents of the school.
The easiest way for young alternative-culture women to make fast money was stripping. It is hard to know precisely the extent of Love's involvement in the sex industry, even when she's the one boasting about it. What was tramatizing for Love was to work as a relatively unattractive stripper, a misery she expressed on her debut album Pretty on the Inside with lyrics such as "There is no power like ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly." Courtney stripped in several places, such as Guam, Japan, Portland, Alaska, and most notably, Jumbo's Clown Room in Los Angeles where her Rolling Stone cover now hangs.
Courtney bounced from Oregon to Minneapolis to San Francisco to Los Angeles. Befriending Babes in Toyland founder Kat Bjelland, L7's Jennifer Finch, James Moreland of The Leaving Trains, Faith No More's Roddy Bottom, and Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan. Courtney founded her band HOLE and released Pretty on the Inside. It was originally a fancier of New Wave pop sounds. Courtney converted to hard-core screaming and began her skyrocket ascent. Courtney cannily contrived what she called the "kinderwhore" look, that was the ripped-up baby-doll dresses with little plastic ribbons in her hair. Bjelland claimed to have invented that look.
Courtney met Kurt Cobain in Portland's Satyricon nightclub in 1989. In 1991 she courted him and punched him in the stomach. They married in Hawaii in 1992. They hung out in an isolated, intermittent druggie haze. Self-destructed by admitting her drug past in Vanity Fair magazine, had a daughter, Frances, brought Kurt back to life. In 1994, Kurt Cobain committed suicide. Courtney was very upset cause she knew that she was never gonna see her husband again and Frances was never gonna see her dad.
Courtney ditched her blonde hair and went brunette, hired publicist Pat Kingsley. She did a couple of big parts in films to revive her acting career and to prove that she could stay straight.
In 1998, her band HOLE released their album Celebrity Skin which has already gone platinum. Courtney is very busy filming the movie "Man On Them Moon" with co-star Jim Carrey. Her film "200 Cigarettes" was a big hit and was recently released. More films are coming in all the time and her schedule was full this year.
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