Courtney LOVE

Her life has swung between extremes, from her husband’s death to her multi platinum albums. But as the singer and actor prepares to turn 60, she’s in a calm place. By Cameron Adams

It’s now been 30 years since the most extreme week of Courtney Love’s life. She became a professional rockstar and a professional widow in the space of seven days.

On April 5, 1994, her husband, Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, 27, died at their Seattle home in one of rock’n’roll’s most shocking suicides. Then on April 12, Love’s band, Hole, released an album that would go multi-platinum, with the prescient title Live Through This.

The first album after signing a million-dollar record deal, it saw Love’s career soar at the worst time in her life. Four months after Cobain’s death she was touring the world with Hole, working through her grief on stage.

It’s reductive to narrow down Love’s achievements to a rock’n’roll survival story, but her strength and resilience outweighs even her ambition.

For most, Love first appeared on their radar during her relationship with grunge icon Cobain. They met in 1990 and were married by 1992 and it was the first major taste of the attention she’d been seeking all her life.

Born Courtney Michelle Harrison in San Francisco in 1964, Love was caught in a custody battle after her parents divorced when she was six. Her mother claimed her father had given Courtney LSD when she was a toddler, which he has denied.

Love would then pinball around the world, moving at age eight with her mother to New Zealand, where she’d be expelled from Nelson College for Girls for misbehaviour, and then to Oregon, back in the US, where at 13 she’d be put in juvenile detention after shoplifting a Kiss T-shirt. In Oregon’s Portland she found a passion for punk rock – specifically female musicians like Patti Smith, Joan Jett and Chrissie Hynde – and eventually met the love of her life.