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Until the suicide of her husband, Kurt Cobain, few people outside the underground rock scene had heard of Courtney Love. What success her band Hole had had was completely overshadowed by that of her husband's, Nirvana. One year on, her latest album has sold over a million copies and her celebrity is rapidly approaching critical mass. Music industry experts predict that by this time next year she'll be bigger than Madonna. The question is, will she be around to enjoy it?

Courtney Love's brief history seems to point with a tragic inevitability to an early death. Born in 1965, her father was a roadie for The Grateful Dead and her mother the heiress to an optical instruments fortune. She was in therapy at the age of two and by the time she was five had taken her first acid trip. At twelve she was sent to a reform school after a bottle of vodka was found in her locker at Junior High and two years later she was working as a stripper in Japan.

A 1992 Vanity Fair cover story asked: "Are Courtney and her husband the Grunge John and Yoko or the next Sid and Nancy?" Courtney and Kurt appeared to believe it was the latter and they would often book into hotels as Mr and Mrs Simon Ritchie, Sid Vicious's real name. Vicious committed suicide in 1979 shortly after he murdered his live-in girlfriend Nancy Spungen and many people expected Courtney Love to follow her husband's lead after he blew his brains out with a shotgun last year.

Her behaviour immediately afterwards certainly gave rise to fevered speculation. She appeared before the grieving fans massing outside the house they shared in Seattle and played a tape recording she had made of her husband's suicide note. As they strained to listen to their hero's last words, Courtney kept interrupting with furious, embittered comments: "Oh, shut up, bastard." It did not make for a dignified spectacle.

Yet a year later she appears to have survived her ordeal. She is in the middle of a succesful tour which brought her to London last week, on which she was accompanied by her daughter, and plans to release a new album shortly. "I work my ass off," she said recently. "I deliver the goddamn goods. And I will deliver them again."

But if Courtney Love hasn't gone the way of Nancy Spungen she hasn't followed Yoko Ono either. If she has prospered since her husband's death it hasn't been as a professional widow. She was rumoured to be back on heroin last year and was photographed kissing Evan Dando of The Lemonheads a few weeks after Kurt's suicide. In the past twelve months she has been linked with Michael Stipe, the lead singer of R.E.M., and Trent Raznor of the Nine Inch Nails. Most recently, she was spotted snogging Amanda de Cadanet at Vanity Fair's Oscars party in Los Angeles. They have since become inseparable.

Courtney Love's refusal to behave like a lady is what makes her such a powerful icon. With her ripped-up baby-doll dresses and her black roots showing through her blonde hair, she is a grunge Barbie, the perfect antidote to Pamela Anderson. For a generation of teenage girls constantly bombarded with images of perfectly-groomed anorexic supermodels it makes a refreshing change to see a rich and successful young woman place a finger over one nostril and blow out a snot rocket. She's become a role model precisely because there's absolutely nothing positive about her. She could be Beavis and Butt-Head's older sister.

On stage with Hole she is a sight to behold. Like Tom Jones, she encourages fans of the opposite sex to throw their underwear up on stage and often responds by throwing her own back. If she sees a security guard mistreating a member of the audience she's not above diving in to protect them and if she happens to spot anyone in a Pearl Jam T-shirt-she loathes Pearl Jam-she sets upon them like a wild animal. Male groupies line up outside her stage door and she sends roadies out to pick up the cute ones.

Such behaviour would be par for the course if she was a male rock 'n' roll star but in a woman it still has the power to shock. Simply by being female, Courtney Love has been able to breath new life into a lot of hoary old rock 'n' roll clichés. If she was a man her antics would be condemned as the usual attention-seeking hijinks of an overgrown adolescent, but because she is a woman they are hailed as liberating and empowering. She is fond of telling interviewers that her gynecologist has told her she has excessive levels of testoterone.

Like Nirvana, whose final album sold over ten million copies, Courtney Love's greatest asset is her authenticity. The grunge movement, of which she is Queen, has always presented itself as an alternative to the shallow, bourgeois values of mainstream popular culture. If you don't shave, don't wash and don't iron your clothes, the logic goes, you must have a bit of spiritual depth. Courtney Love has dirt between her teeth as well as under her fingernails. As far as her fans are concerned, she is indisputably the real thing.

Yet it wouldn't be accurate to describe her simply as the female equivalent of Axl Rose. She also has a touch of Morrissey about her. She constantly refers to her own suicidal tendencies, claiming she is hanging on by a thread. "The only things that keep me on this planet are my daughter and being on tour," she says. Her vulnerability is out there for all to see, worn like a badge of her humanity in the Woody Allen style.

Like her rock 'n' roll lifestyle, there is nothing fake about this. At least, if there was it has long since ceased to matter. As one of her lyrics has it, "I fake it so real I am beyond fake / Someday you will ache like I ache." Who can doubt that she has really suffered after Kurt Cobain's suicide? Indeed, to make matters worse, her daughter was briefly taken away by from her by the child-welfare authorities in Los Angeles after it was reported she had taken heroin during her pregnancy.

Given that her popularity is intimately connected with her suffering, her increasing celebrity is unlikely to prove very theraputic. Her mother, a therapist living in Oregon, says, "My deepest fear about her is that what always made her life so torturous-this kind of psychic pain-is what is making her famous." It is this, above all, which convinces so many people she is not long for this world.

Yet looking at the photographs of her hobnobbing with Brad Pitt in Los Angeles and tooling around in a Rolls Royce in New Orleans, it is difficult to believe she is in the throes of depression. Who knows, perhaps she's on Prozac. For the time being at least, Courtney Love is simply having too good a time to commit suicide and, if her current popularity is anything to go by, things are only going to get better.

The Sunday Times