Daughter of Kurt Cobain
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“How we treat our bodies directly correlates to how we treat our souls. It’s all interconnected. It has to be. So I’m gonna take today to celebrate my vibrant health and the abundance of happiness, gratitude, awareness, compassion, empathy, strength, fear, loss, wisdom, peace and the myriad of other messy emotions I feel constantly. They inform who I am, what my intentions are, who I want to be and they force me to acknowledge my boundaries/limitations.” As the only daughter of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain and Hole frontwoman Courtney Love, Frances Bean Cobain is rock royalty. She was thrown into the spotlight at birth, and has remained there ever since.
While Frances Bean Cobain’s fame might have originated with her parents, she is making a name for herself in her own right with a career as a model and artist. Here’s a closer look at what growing up as the offspring of icons was like for Frances Bean Cobain, along with what she's doing in her life today.
Born into the Spotlight
Frances Bean Cobain was born in Los Angeles, California on August 18, 1992. Wondering how she got her unusual middle name? Her parents, grunge rockers Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, chose it because Kurt thought she resembled a kidney bean on the ultrasound.
Cobain and Love were at the height of their fame when Frances was born. In addition to making headlines for their music, however, they were also making headlines for something else: their struggles with drug use and addiction. This led to early notoriety for Francis due to allegations that her mother had used heroin during her pregnancy. Just two days after France was born, child protective services visited Cobain and Love in the hospital. Frances was removed from her parents’ custody when she was two weeks old. She was eventually returned to their custody, but only after a lengthy legal battle.
Frances was just 18 months old when she visited her father for the last time at a drug rehabilitation facility. A week later, Kurt Cobain was found dead in his Seattle home. While there was some initial controversy regarding how he died, the police concluded that it was the result of suicide.
After Cobain’s death, Frances was mostly raised by her mother. Their relationship was rocky, and Love was barred from having direct or indirect contact with Frances after the 17-year-old testified in court about her mother’s drug abuse. When Frances married in June of 2014, her mother was not invited to the wedding. However, according to several news reports, they’ve since reconciled and grown closer. They have also been spotted together in public in recent years.
Frances also enjoyed a close relationship with Wendy O’Connor, her paternal grandmother describing her to Harper’s Bazaar as “the most constant thing I’ve ever had.”
Finding Her Own Way to Fame
It’s hardly surprising that Frances is somewhat conflicted about her childhood. “I can count on one hand how many people I trust,” she once said. She’s also wary of her fame. “I have been careful about where I go and who I hang out with because if you tell someone the wrong thing, then it’s everywhere,” she said.
Frances also has mixed feelings about her father’s music and once told Rolling Stone, “I don’t really like Nirvana that much. I was around 15 when I realized he was inescapable. Even if I was in a car and had the radio on, there’s my dad. He’s larger than life and our culture is obsessed with dead musicians. We love to put them on a pedestal. If Kurt had just been another guy who abandoned his family in the most awful way possible...But he wasn’t. He inspired people to put him on a pedestal, to become St. Kurt.”
Frances has worked hard to leave her tumultuous past behind, and has enjoyed a successful career as a model for many magazines and high-end brands. In 2006, she was photographed for Elle magazine wearing a famous look of her father’s: a brown cardigan and pajama pants. She also appeared in Harper’s Bazaar dressed as Evita Peron. In 2017, Frances was selected to become the face of designer Marc Jacobs’ Spring/Summer campaign.
Frances has also enjoyed success as a visual artist. (It is a lesser-known fact that Kurt Cobain was also a gifted visual artist.) In 2010, a collection of her work -- under the pseudonym “Fiddle Tim” -- was displayed at Los Angeles’s La Luz de Jesus Gallery. She opened her second gallery show in 2017 at Gallery 30 South in Pasadena, California. According to reports, all of her work from that exhibition sold in less than a week. Her artwork has also been sold online, and has been hailed as "weird and wonderful" by Huffington Post.
Most recently, Frances has been following in her parents’ famous footsteps by making and sharing her own acoustic music -- which she’s described as “raw and truthful” -- on Instagram, where she is very active. She was also a co-executive producer on the 2015 documentary film about her father, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck.
While Frances is enjoying success in her own right, she also inherited 37 percent of her late father’s estate in 2010. She recently said of this inheritance, “My relationship to money is different because I didn’t earn it. It’s almost like this big, giant loan that I’ll never get rid of. I have an almost foreign relationship to it or guilt because it feels like money from somebody that I’ve never met, let alone haven’t earned myself.”
It’s hardly surprising that with rock stars for parents, Cobain’s childhood was less than conventional. Because of this, she identifies with other child celebrities, and dubbed herself the “OG Blue Ivy.” She’s also discussed her unique connection with John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s son, Sean Lennon. “He’s probably one of the only people on the planet who understands in close detail what I’ve gone through,” she said.
Today, Francis is committed to learning from the past in order to avoid continuing the pattern of self-destructive behavior she witnessed in her own parents. “The one way that I was shown how to live was to live in excess, like, live beyond your means. It took me stepping away from that and getting sober in order to realize that no matter how much money you think you have, it’s not permanent.”
Frances is also eager to be recognized for who she is as a person, not merely as her parents’ progeny. “I’m a different person. I don’t want to be titled as Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain’s daughter. I want to be thought of as Frances Cobain," she asserts.
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