Wild singer who became a respected actress

Singer Courtney Love’s outrageous behaviour is legendary in rock circles.

The widow of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain is a former stripper and heroin addict with a talent for courting controversy.

Only this week she is pictured naked in Q magazine having a Brazilian bikini wax.

During the photoshoot she poured champagne over her head, stripped off in a taxi cab and streaked down London’s Park Lane in the early hours of Christmas Eve.

And she halted traffic by lying down in the middle of the road clad only in a pair of knickers and knee-high boots.

Love, 38, is now a respected actress as well as a singer but remains best known for her marriage to Cobain.

The couple met in 1991, when she was the singer in rock band Hole, and married the following year while Love was pregnant with their daughter Frances Bean.

Love and Cobain were self-confessed heroin users and she was alleged to have carried on taking the drug during her pregnancy.

She vehemently denied the allegations and was devastated when Frances Bean was temporarily taken into local authority care as a result.

In April 1994, Cobain shot himself dead at the $5m (€4.6m) home the couple shared in Seattle.

Love had been unpopular with many Nirvana fans who likened her to a latter-day Yoko Ono for reportedly causing a rift between Cobain and the other band members.

But Love refused to be eternally cast as a rock widow.

Instead she underwent a dramatic transformation and reinvented herself as a Hollywood actress.

Out went the “kinder-whore” look of tatty baby doll dresses and tangled hair - replaced by sleek styling and glitzy Versace evening gowns.

It was a remarkable turnaround for a woman who spent her early years as a delinquent, spending time in juvenile detention for shoplifting and making ends meet as a stripper.

The child of hippie parents, her father – Grateful Dead acolyte Hank Harrison - is reputed to have given Love her first acid tab at the age of four and has bragged of disciplining his daughter with pit bulls.

She left home and in the 1980s spent time in Liverpool and London, when she appeared in the low-budget British films Sid And Nancy and Straight To Hell.

Love built on that early acting experience to score her first major success in the 1996 film The People vs Larry Flynt opposite Woody Harrelson.

Her performance as the wife of a porn magnate earned her a Golden Globe nomination and a best supporting actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle.

She followed it up with a critically acclaimed role in Man On The Moon opposite Jim Carrey.

Later this year she will play Lady Macbeth in the forthcoming Shakespeare adaptation Miss June produced by Luc Besson.

But despite her new-found respectability, controversy is never far behind.

She enjoyed a rumoured fling with actor Russell Crowe and hit the headlines for baring her breasts at a gig in a Vancouver nightclub.

And today’s arrest – together with her behaviour during the Q shoot – seems to suggest that her wild child days are here again.