Frances Bean Cobain turns 30 today – Credits: @Stefanie Keenan
“In a few years you’ll see that and be like, ‘Thanks, Dad!’ Anyone who jokes with this sentence is watching Kurt Cobain holding a bottle and their newborn daughter is Krist Novoselic, bassist and one of the founders of Nirvana, in an interview with MTV in 1992. Since her birth in Los Angeles in 1992, Frances Bean Cobain has been the center of attention at every public appearance of the band. who shaped the grunge and underground scene of the 90s and had their leader ordained as a Generation X icon.
Mythical is the image in which Frances, who owes her middle name (Bean, poroto in the English translation) to the appearance her father compared her to in her first ultrasound, appears weeping inconsolably in the arms of drag queen RuPaul on the red one Carpet of the 1993 MTV Awards, along with his father and a young Dave Grohl. “I truly believe this photo perfectly captures the personality that was forged. You are the reason I am the way I am,” the actual protagonist of the image explained on the RuPaul-led podcast What’s the Tee in 2018.
And how is Frances Bean Cobain? A big mystery for most. The only offspring they had during their relationship, Kurt Cobain, and Hole singer Courtney Love was famous before she was born, with withdrawal syndromeon August 18, 1992. Today, at exactly 30 years old, the young woman lives away from the media spotlight, defines herself as a “visual artist” and is committed to preserving her father’s legacy.
RuPaul with Dave Grohl, Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, Courtney Love and Frances Bean Cobain – Credits: @Jeff Kravitz
When her mother became a grunge widow with Cobain’s suicide on April 5, 1994, she would have to fill the role of daughter and orphan, much to her regret. And all of this in just 20 months. “I can’t bear the thought of Frances becoming a sinister, miserable and self-destructive rocker like I’ve become (…) her life will be much happier without me,” her father wrote in the suicide note they found together. to his corpse.
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Despite making timid forays into the music world – in one interview he defined his sound as like PJ Harvey and Fiona Apple were fighting over pineapples, a fight only punctuated by the screams of Dolly Parton and, from heaven, Jeff Buckley was interrupted – , Cobain’s daughter, whose godparents are REM singer Michael Stipe and actress Drew Barrymore, hasn’t turned out to be the “sinister, wretched, self-destructive rocker” her father feared. He hasn’t even decided on cinema or fashion as a career.
As a teenager, Frances turned down roles she was offered in the films to star in the Twilight saga and play Tim Burton’s Alice. At age 19, to coincide with her birthday and the 20th anniversary of the Nevermind album, she posed for fashion designer and photographer Hedi Slimane and accompanied family friend Marc Jacobs to the New York designer’s 2017 Met Gala spring campaign.
What Frances de Kurt has inherited, along with 140 million euros, is the fortune that the leader of Nirvana still generates and control of his image rights, which add up to 100,000 dollars a month his passion for painting and drawing. In 2010, under the pseudonym Fiddle Tim, he exhibited his creations at a gallery in Los Angeles, California for the first time.
On her Instagram profile @thespacewitch with 1.5 million followers, the young woman shows her art alongside Dropper details from her private life. “I wanted to share some moments captured/created last year that brought me great joy,” he wrote on Jan. 2 in one of his latest releases, where you can see photos of his dogs, among other things, of her as a baby with her father, her paternal grandmother, Wendy O’Connor, a selfie, and also her current partner, professional skater and musician Riley Hawk, son of skateboard icon Tony Hawk.
Hoping that 2022 will be filled with authentic connections, lots of warmth and deep self-discovery for all. Happy New Year,” concluded the message she posted after a year away from social media, something that she herself says has brought her peace of mind.
A difficult balance to strike for this young woman, who would be separated from her parents at just two weeks old after her mother admitted in an interview with Vanity Fair that she had used heroin during her pregnancy.
“If there’s one thing that separates me from this rock ‘n’ roll thing, it’s her. I don’t want her to suffer the consequences of my life,” her late father reflects on a home recording in the documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015). , featuring unpublished images donated by the family of Nirvana’s leader. Frances attended as executive producer to ensure, as she later admitted, that her father’s myth was not romanticized. She later personally asked Lana de Rey via Twitter not to make the suicide of one of the most famous members of the fateful 27 club a glamorous fact.
Courtney Love, her daughter Frances Bean Cobain and behind them Kurt Cobain before the MTV Awards ceremony held in Los Angeles in September 1992
The film’s premiere at the 2015 Sundance Festival was the perfect pretext for Courtney Love’s public reunion afterward Frances would have wandered “like a nomad” in more than 27 different homes throughout her life, but mainly between her paternal grandmother Wendy O’Connor’s farm in Olympia (Washington, USA) and the California hotel Chateau Marmont, which she frequents visited with his mother. In 2003, Love again lost custody of her daughter after being arrested for attempted robbery, drug overdose and suicide threats. The Hole singer got Frances back after a stint in rehab and lost her again for a third time in 2009.
Frances’ love life has also been full of ups and downs, although she now boasts stability with Hawk. She married musician Isaiah Silva in 2014 and divorced two years later. “I think I got married and thought about having a family very early on, unlike my parents who only had stability for two years,” Cobain reflected on the podcast with RuPaul. During the uphill battle over their legal separation, the couple settled and the singer was able to keep the Martin D-18 left-bridge electric guitar used by Kurt Cobain in his legendary 1993 performance on MTV Unplugged.
The promotion of the documentary, which tells the most intimate facets of her father, also served to make the young woman, who posed for ELLE magazine at the age of 16 wearing the pants and sweater Kurt Cobain had married in Hawaii, speak for first time about the musician’s suicide, which Courtney would not tell him about until he was five years old after many sessions of therapy.
“Kurt got to the point where he finally had to sacrifice everything he was for his art because the world was asking him to. I think that was one of the main reasons why he felt like he didn’t want to be here and that everyone would be happier without him,” the young woman, then 22, explained in an exclusive interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
“At 15, I realized I couldn’t escape my father. Even when I’m in the car with the radio on, it’s there. It’s larger than life, especially in our culture obsessed with the death of musicians. We love putting them on a pedestal,” she lamented in the same publication where she was an intern and in which one of her veteran journalists, David Fricke, described her father as the John Lennon of his generation.
Frances Bean and Courtney Love never had a very good relationship
As she awaits Courtney Love’s memoir, which she announced earlier in August that she was completing after a decade of work, no one knows for sure if Frances Cobain, who admitted her alcohol and drug addiction in 2018, has seen sober after two years of those Pictures of Krist Novoselic on MTV Cobain prophesying that he will thank his father in the future. From her words in that exclusive interview with Rolling Stone, in which she also admitted that she didn’t like Nirvana’s music, the discreet daughter of grunge once felt a deep yearning for something that never happened. “If he [Kurt Cobain] I would have lived, I would have had a father. And that would have been an incredible experience.”