Courtney Love's late-'90s "clean" image phase

It was like Madonna's Ray of Light period.

Complete bullshit.

Nobody ever really cared about her.

Please name these "few pretty good (if not great) movies"

I think Celebrity Skin was an insanely great album. I mean, sure, it's a Billy Corgan album with Courney on vocals. But it is exceptional.

^^ Courtney. Sorry!

R3 "200 Cigarettes" (pretty good for a fluffy 1980s-set comedy); "The People vs. Larry Flynt" and "Man on the Moon" are, by many accounts, great.

Yes R4 - always give credit to a man. Just like Kurt wrote Live Through This. Misogyny is your friend, obviously.

R4 I agree. The title track in particular is a fantastic power pop/rock song. It's not even three minutes long, but it's loaded with all sorts of clever literary references, sardonic observations of celebrity and Hollywood culture, and an extremely catchy, obnoxious guitar riff that grabs you by the balls. "I'm all I wanna be, a walking study in demonology"—I mean, come on. I don't know how you can't love it.

Those of us who knew her in the early 90s laughed our asses off. That's Courtney: she'd do ANYTHING to get what she wants.

If it wasn’t for Gloria Steinem, Courtney Love would’ve at least been nominated if not outright won an Oscar for Larry Flynt. But Steinem torpedoed the film’s Oscar campaign.

Milos Forman should’ve just shown more of the original Hustler layouts in the film rather than sort of white-washing Flynt’s image. I mean, as much as he could’ve.

Not sure Hollywood would’ve known what to do with Love from there but she probably would’ve told them.

Sure, R9. And how did you know Courtney Love in the early ‘90s?

R8, and Malibu, which she’d been writing for years. The whole thing is a peach.

I still can't believe she was dating Yale grad WASP Edward Norton during this time. I bet they had a lot of fun in the sack.

The late 90’s was a time when several white trash celebs tried to reinvent themselves with “clean” images. Madonna was another one. I didn’t buy it then and knew it wouldn’t last. As we can see today, I was correct on both counts.

"Those of us who knew her in the early 90s"

R9 Bless your heart. Text her and see what she's doing right now!

Mary Hart in the background of OP's pic looks insanely jealous

Grunge was over by ‘95. The Widow Cobain had no choice but to find a different image, especially if she was looking to make it as an actress.

R14 I don't think either of them qualify as coming from white trash backgrounds. Madonna's father was an engineer for Chrysler, and she grew up with a housekeeper (whom her dad later married), and Courtney's mom was a privileged hippie whose parents left Courtney a trust fund. In Courtney's case, at least, she was not born white trash—through whatever the circumstances may have been, she chose the rougher path.

Want to know the real CUNTney? Watch the SOAKED IN BLEACH documentary. This bitch should be rotting in jail. She has Kurt and El Duce’s blood on her heroin addicted hands!

Yeah, let’s be clear: only David Bowie was allowed to reinvent himself! But not women! Not ever!

R18 Thank you for the lecture. You’re right. They are both some of the classiest women to have ever graced the earth.

Better?

R11, my partner was in a band that toured at the same time, and lived in Portland and Seattle.

R22 Did Courtney do anal?

R21 low iq cuntress who can only shart out binaries.

"I'm all I wanna be, a walking study in demonology"

That is my all-time favorite line from a song from the 90s. And I apologize for saying it was a Billy Corgan album. I do believe is influence is all over it, as was Kurt's on Live Through This. And I'm sure those lyrics came from Courtney., as well as many of the musical arrangements on the album. But although the producer for Celebrity Skin is credited as Michael Beinhorn, there is a twisted polish to it that definitely says "Billy Corgan was here." Wikipedia does say that "unlike Hole's previous releases, the final songs on Celebrity Skin featured instrumental contributions from several musicians outside the band, primarily Billy Corgan, who co-wrote the musical arrangements on five songs." And yes, you can hear it.

I don’t know anything she’s done except The People v. Larry Flynt and loved her in it. That was a flawless performance.

R22 is probably telling the truth. I was born/raised in Portland and my dad was a musician who remembers seeing Courtney around town back in the day. There are stories aplenty about her in that city during in the mid-late-'80s. There is a character in the novel/film "Bongwater" who burns down her boyfriend's house in Portland and then flees to New York to "be famous" only to end up living in a squat. It comes as no surprise that the author, Michael Hornburg, has admitted that she was based on Courtney.

Yeah R25, except that Live Through This sounds nothing like a Nirvana album.

You’re referring to the influence of Eric Erlandson, Kristin Pfaff and Patty Schemel.

Courtney now says she should have married Ed Norton, that she left him for someone in A&R who stole all her money.

She may have cleaned up her looks in the late '90s, but I doubt she stopped being a drama queen.

Norton dated Salma Hayek after Love dumped him.

R28 Eric Erlandson gets little to no credit for what he did in Hole, which is a shame considering he probably wrote 75% of the guitar compositions. Courtney can play her power chords and make a lot of noise, but she is not a skilled guitarist. Erlandson (as well as Patty and, later, Melissa Auf der Maur). were the anchors that held that band together in the middle of the cyclone that is Courtney.

Love her or hate her (and mostly hate her) but she's much more talented than that hack Madonna.

She played the mother in a Lifetime movie about the Menendez brothers and I thought she was very good in it. The scenes where she's lying awake in bed and knowing that her husband was about to do as he got out of bed in the middle of the night (thinking she was asleep). Her wanting to save her sons but also not wanting to upset hubby. I was surprised how graphic the daddy-making-son-suck-his-cock scenes were.

I also liked her in that JT Leroy movie.

R37, I remember seeing her regularly at pioneer square in Portland, when I was a teenager and hung out there. Portland was a pretty small town back then. Everyone into the punk scene knew each other.

R29 Why does she look like Lady Elaine Fairchilde now?

Murderess!!

R23 I remember her implying that she only did anal in committed relationships once when she was on Howard Stern

Eek. Less than a year before the People vs Larry Flynt, Hole played at the tiniest bar in New Orleans. I wasn’t there and I was kinda surprised because she was petty fucking famous as Cobain’s wife and widow by that point and definitely could have played a bigger bar. But friends were there and they said after the show, the bar emptied out and she came out and sat with them to drink. And they said she was the BIGGEST TRAIN WRECK EVER. She was wasted, she was harassing the bartender, she was glommed onto my friends who were literally the only people in the bar. She started singing (badly) and tried dancing and fell down and then she burst into tears and started crying something like “Fuck you Kurt! You fucking asshole! You’re all fucking assholes! You did this to him!” And my friends (literally the only two other people in the bar) are getting screamed at by Courtney Love and are absolutely mesmerized and glued to their chairs. They wouldn’t leave until she left. And she was finally dragged away by a bodyguard/handler type.

And that Halloween, that couple of friends went as Dead Kurt and Courtney for Halloween.

Her best Howard Stern appearance.

I think the A&R person she's referring to at R29 is James Barber, an exec whom she was with while she was making her solo album. Courtney apparently sued his ex-wife after she ran over Courtney's foot with her Volvo in a parking lot.

No one believed her. She had been too loudly open about who she really was before Kurt died for anyone to think that she had really changed.

I'm glad her kid got away from her. She is such a horribly toxic woman.

True story: when she was trying to clean up her image in the late 1990s, she hired Pat Kingsley, the West Coast dragon lady publicist who kept an iron grip on Tom Cruise's image.

Pat had Courtney pay for an incredibly high end set of photos, in which she looked beautiful. Then Pat sent them to the press saying these were the *only* official photos of Courtney, and any outlet who used different studio shots would be frozen out of her client list.

Publicists don't have that kind of absolute power any more — but that was why, for a year or two, Courtney's "clean" pictures were everywhere. I don't know who fired whom after that first year or two.

Thread is dull because the woman is DULL.

Sloppy trainwreck is something everyone has seen once and doesn't need to see nor contemplate ever again.

talentless and massively overrated junkie whore!!

R42 she is many things, but dull is certainly not one of them

Everyone got a fabulous fresh-new-you makeover in the 90s.

[quote] ""200 Cigarettes" (pretty good for a fluffy 1980s-set comedy)"

I love that movie, R6, and I own a copy. She IS pretty good in it. Though part of me always wants to tear Paul Rudd away from the skank. But the whole cast is great. Even DL pariah Kate Hudson. For the uninitiated, here's the trailer.

She's typical Gen X, always think she's so cool but really just an empty vessel of bitterness and ennui.

>>> a disheveled hooker who just escaped a serial killer trucker by leaping from his cab into a ditch,

You really know how to turn a phrase, OP. I tip my hat, sir!

Takeaway: Edward Norton has a big dong that ladies love in their ass.

She is phenomenally talented, while still a trainwreck. She can be a great actress, and really fun performer when she's "on."

I like her in spite of her insanity and narcissism. There's something strangely endearing about her. She's very childlike and fragile. And even with crazy attitude, she seems very approachable and friendly. She said she's on the autism spectrum and it does make sense. There's high comorbidity with personally disorders like histrionic and antisocial. And autistic women can be brash and hypersexual. Interestingly, autistic men are shy and celibate. Gender conformity isn't a thing with autistic people.

Her boobs look really far apart in OP's pic.

OMG. Celebrity Skin is such a GREAT listen - the hooks on this album are TO DIE FOR. I always loved Hole. Courtney is an amazing writer.

R52 they’re implants I’m sure, though the pose with the arms outstretched is probably making them look like that. She also has very broad shoulders for a woman

[quote] You really know how to turn a phrase, OP. I tip my hat, sir!

You sound like a nerdy Twitter geek.

[quote] OMG. Celebrity Skin is such a GREAT listen - the hooks on this album are TO DIE FOR. I always loved Hole. Courtney is an amazing writer.

OMG hi Courtney/r53!

I adore that she exists. I love her music and listen to her daily

Kevyn Aucoin did great work on her during this phase.

Agreed R58. He glammed her up very nicely. The transformation portraits he did of her as Jean Harlow were also great. There are several photos of them together online and it looks like they had a lot of fun working together.

When I saw her in the movie Trapped, I knew the mask of glamour was sliding off. She looked and acted messy in that. That was 2002. So her acting career was about five years long. Weirdly, that’s the range for most movie actresses. They get about half a decade.

Her new identity as a British Buddhist in riding gear makes me uneasy.

She auditioned to play Nancy in the movie "Sid and Nancy." She ended up playing a smaller role in the movie. She said she was glad she never got the Nancy Spungen part because she would have been typecast.

I think 2001 was the beginning of the downward slide for her, R60. At that point, she'd ended Hole and was being sued by her record label for not fulfilling their contract (I think she had agreed to do like eight albums or something, which she clearly did not have the focus or work ethic to make happen). She'd also gone over the edge with surgery and fillers which really bloated her face. I thought her acting was okay "Trapped", but she looked like a drag queen on prednisone.

Things got really crazy a couple of years later when she was living in New York, constantly high on cocaine and smoking crack. Her Wikipedia page has all the details, and it was insane. There is some hilarious media of her from that era on talkshows and Howard Stern where she is clearly coked out, but she's still sharp and funny as hell.

Back of the net.

she was at the top of her game here

It never gave clean

Ugly hag. Sometimes witty. Self aggrandizing. Musically talentless.

I seem to remember that she wanted, of course, to be an actress, sucking up to Forman (and other directors) and calling him 'maestro' ffs. She also claimed her wild image was just put on for the rock crowd and she took acting seriously. It wasn't true, and her messy personality won out.

She was ok in Larry Flynt, but that was because she was playing herself - a slatternly junkie. Other than that, what R67 said.

It was done as an attempt for moviestardom.

Love has it all, except good looks. Surgery improved her looks but she's never been conventionally attractive.

I always think it's so interesting she's the granddaughter of the highly respected American novelist Paula Fox.

A lot of us knew she was faking it when she was supposedly clean, sober, and glamorous, so by the time this infamous image spread like wildfire on the internet in 2004, we all had a good chuckle.

Dating Ed Norton for a few years helped sell her new image. He was in prime up-his-own-ass and everyone assumed if he was with her for that long there must be some depth there.

I don't think she and Kirk would have lasted even if he didn't kill himself. They were just too different in interests. Kirk did want fame but he wanted to be an artist respected for lyrics and social commentary. Courtney just wanted attention and to be a Hollywood diva. Both were talented but in different ways. I don't buy the whole Kirk was bullied and married Courtney out of pregnancy obligation. He wasn't an old fashioned guy and I don't think she could control him. He seemed meek but he wasn't. He liked her and wanted a family with her. I think they would have split because of differing interests. But I don't think it would have been hostile either. I also think Kirk wanted to end Nirvana and go solo.

I wish people would stop making Kirk into a martyr. He was a grown ass man who was strong-willed, intelligent, funny and charming. Not a big baby. He had mental issues, physical ailments and a drug addiction and ultimately caved but if he got sober and found a good treatment. I think he would still be here. Who knows?

Who is Kirk?

Lol I meant Kurt Cobain. R74. I can go hide now

[quote]I seem to remember that she wanted, of course, to be an actress, sucking up to Forman (and other directors) and calling him 'maestro' ffs.

I don’t know what you’re talking about R68.

Her last big film "Trapped" (2002) seemed promising, but she went into a tailspin afterwards: drug relapses, bad boyfriends and bad plastic surgery. Despite co-starring with Kevin Bacon and Charlize Theron (who went on to have the career Courtney coveted) silver screen stardom was pretty much over.

WEHT hot Stuart Townsend? Charlize dumped him and he fell off the earth.

R65, she gave away her guitar at the end of the song to a fan in the crowd!

He dated Halle Berry. Kurt needed Courtney's street credibility. She was punk rock as hell from a very young age. As crazy as he wanted to actually be.

She absolutely should have been nominated for The People vs. Larry Flynt as the doomed Althea Flynt. I vividly remember her face, dead in the bathtub. Brilliant performance.

That was the infamous Juliette Binoche surprise win year and, looking at the nominees, I’m not sure who I’d bump to give her a spot. Maybe Marianne Jean-Baptiste? I don’t know. She must have been 6th or 7th that year in voting.

R69 she was pudding-faced as a teenager, but weight loss and her first rhinoplasty really changed her looks a lot. I think she was at her prettiest around '91 when Hole released their first album. There was something striking about her looks. I actually think she got worse looking around the Celebrity Skin era—her face got puffed up and she started to look like a drag queen version of Tara Reid. She was also apparently really into yoga/exercise at the time, so her body got pretty muscular, which was not a good look on her frame—she's like 5'10" and has wide shoulders, so she started to look mannish.

She is not cute, but intense. Strong personality and relentless. She had everything to make it as an actor excluding natural good looks. Woody Harrelson is a successful actor and ugly.

Woody Harrelson is hot.

I suppose it's tempting, once you make it big and start seeing yourself as a star, to give in and go full-on glamorous, especially if designers and stylists are fawning all over you. You lose weight, go blonder, wear high fashion, do glamour shoots. Especially if you have diva instincts and always wanted to be thought of as pretty and sexy. Princess Diana was another one who quickly went in that direction once she got famous.

I'm sure Courtney was eager to shed her ripped-nightie image and be a movie star. These days she's a proper tweed-wearing English lady with scarves.

Woody Harrelson has a big dick.

Trent Reznor has a tiny dick.

I do think Kurt influenced Hole. In the sense he pushed Courtney to write more interesting lyrics and better melodies. Even if just by osmosis.

And I think Courtney become a truly fantastic rock/pop lyricist. She also wrote some great hooks melodically.

Case in point: This linked song. It's fantastic.

My all-time favorite Hole lyric: "I fake it so real, I am beyond fake.“

That is why we knew that the glamour image won’t last and it didn’t. I would not want be friends with her and be anywhere near her because she is fucking bonkers. But she is entertaining and always brings the drama, so I’ll take Courtney over boring Billie Eilish or Lorde any day.

By and large her body of musical work is undistinguished.

When did Courtney get her first and second nose jobs?

R91 first nose job was around 1990, shortly after she'd formed Hole. She says in her Behind the Music episode that Eric Erlandson paid for it because he could afford to (he was working as an accountant for Capitol Records when he met Courtney, who was an itinerant stripper at that time). Courtney made some extravagant assertion that they wouldn't be able to sell records if she looked like she did with the nose she was born with. If I remember right, her bassist said that Courtney modeled her "new" nose off of hers, but it had to be redone because Courtney kept picking at it and screwed up the healing process. If I were to guess, she probably had her third nose job around the time Celebrity Skin came out, and had God knows how many others after that.