Courtney Love

Live Through This, the second album by Courtney Love's band Hole, came out in April 1994, days after the death of her husband, Kurt Cobain. It was an extraordinary record, furious and wounded, and it is now widely regarded as one of the best rock albums of the decade. At the time, much of the coverage focused on her rather than the music, and Love has spent much of her career fighting to have her work judged on its own terms.

She was born at 2:08 p.m. on July 9, 1964, in San Francisco, as her birth record shows, and her Sun and Moon are both in Cancer, almost together, in the ninth house. Cancer is the sign of raw feeling and fierce protectiveness, and with both lights there, emotion is the core of the personality. The ninth house concerns wider horizons, belief and the urge to push beyond the familiar. Astrologers would read the combination as someone whose feelings are worn openly and expressed with provocative force, which describes Love's songs and her public life alike.

Her childhood was chaotic. Her parents separated when she was young; her father, Hank Harrison, was associated with the Grateful Dead, and her mother, Linda Carroll, became a therapist. She moved between Oregon, New Zealand and California, spent time in juvenile detention, and supported herself as a dancer and in small film roles before forming Hole in Los Angeles in 1989.

Mercury in Leo sits in the tenth house of public life, giving her a dramatic, outspoken public voice. Love has always said exactly what she thinks, in interviews and on stage, often to her own cost, and she became one of the most quoted and most criticized women in rock.

Venus, retrograde, and Mars both fall in Gemini in her eighth house, which deals with intensity, crisis and intimate bonds. Venus and Mars there describe passionate, volatile relationships, and her marriage to Cobain, which began in 1992, was one of the most scrutinized in music. Their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born that year.

After Cobain's death, Love kept working. Her performance as Althea Flynt in Miloš Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt earned a Golden Globe nomination in 1997, and Hole's next album, Celebrity Skin, was a commercial success. She has been open about her struggles with addiction and about recovery.

Libra is on her Ascendant, which, oddly for such a confrontational figure, describes a charming and socially aware first impression. Those who have worked with her often describe that side of her: witty, warm and well read. The double Cancer in the ninth house is what the audience heard, a voice that refused to keep its feelings to itself.