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Courtney Love (born July 9, 1964) is an American rock musician and Golden Globe-nominated actress, best-known as lead singer for the now-defunct alternative rock band Hole and for her two-year marriage to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.

She’s 43!

Rolling Stone has called Love “the most controversial woman in the history of rock.”

Courtney Love was born Courtney Michelle Harrison on July 9, 1964, at 2:08 p.m., in San Francisco, California, where her parents first met and married. Her mother, Linda Carroll (born Risi), and father, Hank Harrison, had known each other only a few months when Carroll became pregnant.

Love’s biological family broke apart rapidly while she was still very young. During a child custody case following Love’s parents’ divorce, both her mother and one of her girlfriends presented letters to the court implying her father had given the child, then four years old, LSD. Harrison denies this allegation and has passed polygraph tests; however, these allegations led to full custody being awarded to Love’s mother.

Love then spent a troubled childhood with her mother as she wandered through three husbands and as many hippie communes in Oregon, and various schools including a boarding school in Nelson, New Zealand. Before arriving in New Zealand, Love had been left in the United States with a therapist, while her mother, the new husband and her half-sisters went on ahead; when she was sent for, Love was sent to the boarding school in Nelson.

While in boarding school, Love wrote poetry, joined a Bay City Rollers fan club, and, at the age of 12 (once back in the U.S., ostensibly), applied to join the Mickey Mouse Club; she was rejected after reading a poem by Sylvia Plath at the audition.

By the time she was a teenager, Love had stolen a Kiss t-shirt from Woolworth’s. With no family to accept responsibility for her, Love spent the next three years shuttling between foster families and detainment facilities. No placement was ever permanent. Love would later tell biographer Poppy Z. Brite that she was turned on to punk rock during this time by a social worker in the juvenile hall who gave her three records: The Pretenders, Squeeze, and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

At 15, Love emancipated herself from her family and traveled around the U.S., England and Republic of Ireland, living on a trust fund established for her by her mother’s adoptive parents. During her time in England, Love met, befriended and moved in with musician Julian Cope in his Toxteth, Liverpool home, and became a regular face at rock shows.

Eventually, she would head back to the states, ending up in Portland, Oregon, still avidly pursuing music. Love’s first rock musician boyfriend was Rozz Rezabek of the Portland band band Theatre of Sheep, who had an affair with her while she was still underage. Though the two wrote each other copious love letters, Love has said in many interviews that he did not take her virginity; she claims her first sexual encounter was a one-night stand with Michael Mooney, a sometimes-guitarist for Echo & the Bunnymen and later to Spiritualism. Mooney denies this ever happened.

Love spent her late teens in and out of foster homes and state facilities. She worked sporadically in Japan, Taiwan, Guam, Los Angeles and Alaska as a stripper, a job she returned to at several points in her life before becoming famous. She later told Liz Evans of The Guardian that this job provided her with a great deal of creative inspiration.

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