Love, Courtney (1964– )

US rock music vocalist and actor. Flamboyant and outspoken, she was a seminal and controversial figure on the alternative rock scene during the 1990s. She became notorious for her attacks against fellow musicians and the music industry in general, her drug use, and her marriage to Nirvana legend Kurt Cobain. Her grunge band Hole (1989– ) was influenced by punk and new-wave music and featured rage-filled songs about female suffering. Her solo debut, America's Sweetheart, was released in 2004.

Hole's debut album, Pretty, was released in 1991, followed by Live Through This (1994). She was nominated for a Golden Globe award and received a New York Film Critics award for her performance as the drug-addicted wife of a pornographer in the film The People Vs Larry Flynt (1996). Other films include Feeling Minnesota (1996), Basquiat (1996), 200 Cigarettes (1999), Man on the Moon (1999), Beat (2000), and Trapped (2002).

She was born in San Francisco, California, and raised in Oregon. Her first band was the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based all-female Babes in Toyland. Her feature film debut was in Sid and Nancy (1986), a film based on Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. She followed with another punk rock film, Straight to Hell (1987), which fared poorly in the cinema, and she worked as a stripper before founding her band Hole in 1989. Her celebrity status increased dramatically after Cobain's suicide in 1994.