Frances Bean Cobain at 15 (Harper's Bazaar)

Frances Bean Cobain, 15, the daughter of Courtney Love and late grunge legend Kurt Cobain, graces the March issue of Harper's Bazaar, including a photo-spread for the magazine as Evita, and characters from Grease, and Beauty and the Beast. About Frances

Frances is disarmingly direct, dispensing bons mots like a 17th-century raconteur. (This may explain why the French period drama Molière is her current favorite movie.)

She's implicitly aware that this interview—with no hovering minders, no publicists, no Mom—represents something of a coming-out party. And she is dressed for the occasion in a sparkly red J. Maskrey cardigan, a navy tank, and a black American Apparel skirt. She recently dyed her hair black, accenting the look with more red lipstick, red fingernails, and — mais oui — red toenails. She has a brand-new nose piercing, too. "Mom went with me. She was freaking out because she thought it was going to be a big stud or a big ring," she says. "And, God, it hurt. It was worth it, though, because it looks so cool."

Her Genes (& her father's eyes)
But it's Frances's eyes that have it: Huge pools of "like green, blue, yellow, purple, orange, gray," they are startlingly and immediately reminiscent of her late father, Kurt Cobain. They are inescapable. "I'm very lucky because my eyes work with almost any hair color," Frances notes breezily. "Thanks for the genetics, parents. Rock on!"

Frances talks about being a child of famous parents

“These people are fascinated by me, but I haven’t done anything,” she says. “If you’re a big Nirvana fan, a big Hole fan, then I understand why you would want to get to know me, but I’m not my parents.”

Without dismissing the accomplishments of her folks (her father was dead before she was 2), Cobain advises, “People need to wait until I’ve done something valid with my life.” When asked if she planned to follow in her mother and father’s footsteps and go into music, Frances said she thought about photography and/or journalism, and might do a summer internship at Rolling Stone.

Courtney Love on her daughter

"Whatever you want to say about me, go look at my kid. ... I don't think any child has ever been more wanted. And I don't think that any parents have wanted to fuck up less."

The Loves of Frances Bean the Teenager

These days, Frances is getting on with the business of being a teenager. Picking up her Sex and the City DVD, she grins. "I am pretty much a shoe junkie. Think Carrie Bradshaw times 20. It's not even cute; it's sick."

She adores the style of Dita Von Teese. "She's like a very dark, gothic, beautiful burlesque doll. Oh, hey, want to see what I bought on eBay?" She runs to her room, returning with a curvy Dita-esque vintage purple dress. "It looks amazing on. I'm not gonna lie."

What does Frances aspire to be?
"I want to be sublimely happy. I want to be able to live in a way that isn't too hectic. Calm. And I want those around me to be sublimely happy as well.

"But," she continues, her big green-blue-yellow-purple-orange-gray eyes widening, "I'm really scared to hit adulthood because if everything is this hectic and I'm only 15 years old, what the hell is going to happen when I'm 22?"

Click here to read the entire interview.

Interview with Jack Nicholson (Parade Magazine)

After decades of great films and grand love affairs,
‘I want to go on forever’

By Dotson Rader, Parade Magazine, December 9, 2007

His Stylist for the photoshoot - Victoria "Posh" Beckham.

After three Oscars and a decades-long career defined by amazing roles, Jack Nicholson has proven himself to be one of the greatest actors working in film today. Dotson Rader spent nearly seven hours with Nicholson in Los Angeles, his home for 54 years. Below are excerpts from their conversation.

Nicholson, known for his cool worldliness and womanizing, seems warm and expansive when I meet him in Beverly Hills. He lives on a Mulholland Drive hilltop in the eight-room house he bought 36 years ago.

“I used to live so freely,” Nicholson says. “The mantra for my generation was ‘Be your own man!’ I always said, ‘Hey, you can have whatever rules you want—I’m going to have mine. I’ll accept the guilt. I’ll pay the check. I’ll do the time.’ I chose my own way. That was my philosophical position well into my 50s. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to adjust.” Jack Nicholson’s hair is thinning and going gray. At 70, he has a middle-age spread and legs that aren’t as nimble as they used to be. He tools about L.A. in the back of a very large black limousine, chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes. “My accountant tells me that if I don’t drive, I save money by not insuring myself.”

His Working-Class Childhood

“I grew up in a beauty parlor my family ran, so I’m used to getting along with ladies. I prefer their company, for the most part. I was pampered from the very beginning.”

Jack was raised in New Jersey by his grandmother, whom he believed to be his mother. Only at age 37 did he learn that his real mother was his “older sister,” June. His biological father is unknown.

"[New] Jersey's the most parochial place in the world, but the Shore, from Red Bank to Point Pleasant, was a very great place for a kid to grow up. It's a country club kind of mixed area with every kind of person there. All the way from the beach to Main Street, you could read the dollar sign on the houses. As little kids, we didn't deal with class boundaries. We were all over one another."

Hanging Out at New Jersey's Monmouth Park Race Track...and Handicapping Horses
"Even that I felt was an advantage. I was a good handicapper. That's where I got my spending money. The first car I bought was with racetrack money. Even when I worked at MGM, I ran football cards for the bookie there. In the entire season we paid off just two tickets. That's how hard it is to pick three winners against a spread."

His Catholic Family
"I've a very Catholic Irish grandmother, one of the Lynches. She is the root of the family, although my immediate family were failed Irish Catholics. So I had to haltingly investigate Catholicism by myself because nobody asked me to go to church. I was the oldest kid in my First Communion classes. In my opinion, if you're going to be theocratic, Catholicism is the most intelligent belief system."

"My family were tough-minded people who didn't go much for what they called the 'shanty Irish' or professional Irish. But they were Irish, and it manifested itself from an early age. I could always express my opinion, like everybody else, and things got talked about. I wasn't inhibited by anything."

The Passing of His Relatives
"My mother was the first to die, and then my grandmother. We were kind of on the outs because she thought I'd wasted enough time trying to make it in show business. I didn't take well to the criticism. Then she got sick with cancer, and of course I took care of her."

"The last time I saw her we talked quite a bit about life and death. You've got those bright, terminal eyes staring at you and asking you a lot of questions. I know everything about charity and hospitals because none of us had any money."

Moving to Los Angeles
"In California, I didn't know anybody except June [his birth mother], who was living here in Hollywood Park. She taught herself to type and worked her way up. I liked the idea of California. Anyway, I didn't feel I was ready to go to college and work at night. I thought I'd stay here a semester and then go home to college. Frankly, when the time came to go back East, I didn't have the money."

"I always knew there wasn't going to be anybody to help me and emotionally support me, that whatever I did I'd have to do on my own. It makes you rather desperate when you're 16 and you don't know what you want to do with your life, but you know you have to do something."

His Love for Acting
"Once I got started acting I loved it. I wanted to be the best actor possible. I worked very hard at the craft of it. I went to classes for 12 years. I'm a member of The Actors Studio. There's nobody successful who didn't study a lot. It doesn't exist."

"One of the tricks in acting is 'Don't unact anything!' If you are working and you feel like s***, don't try to make yourself look good because it all starts with yourself."

"When I made About Schmidt, I didn't feel much better than Schmidt. Same with The Bucket List. When I'd get up in the morning and walk past the mirror, I'd go, oh Jesus! Jack the semi-movie star with that gut sticking out. I'd think, 'Hell, Jack, I don't know if you'll ever come back from this one.' But by then, I was already thinking, 'I don't care.' I'm a lucky man. I'm an independent artist."

His Take on Women
"These issues between men and women are not psychological. Look, remember what a gland is. Most of these are glandular issues. A gland is what allows that mother to lift that truck off a child. Whatever intelligent design is, it's not going to leave the continuation of the human species up to fashion-crazy, flitting mentalities. It's in those glands."

"The infatuation cycle of 18 months hasn't changed a lot since the monkeys. Look at the numbers. Eighteen months is nine months doubled. A woman's entire system is set so that when you're having that procreative act with a woman, you're dealing with a being whose actual cycle is nine months. It doesn't have to do with her brain. It has to do with her entire bodily system, which is there to overcome the brain. We don't legislate this stuff. We don't out-think it. You cannot change these fundamental things that we are as human beings--but you can adjust to it."

His Extraordinary Art Collection
"I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings, and every time I look at them I see something different."

"I never thought about paintings as money. I bought only what I could afford at the time. I got involved in buying paintings when Diana Vreeland got me to an auction at Sotheby's in England."

"I know pictures. I've always enjoyed them. And up came this beautiful Tiepolo drawing at the auction house. I bought it for Angelica Huston, as a present. That's how I got started. I've bought things in Sotheby's that I couldn't sell to people for 10 dollars on the sidewalk outside."

Click here to read the entire interview.

Interview with Courtney Love (Telegraph UK)

Who is this smart, put-together woman? Why, it's Courtney Love, formerly the shambolic drug-addled widow of a tragic rock legend, now a sleek Givenchy muse, devout Buddhist and doting mother. But has the chaotic hell-raiser been replaced by a boring model citizen? Not quite, as Nigel Farndale discovers when he meets her.

Courtney Love is 43 and in fine shape. Thanks to Madonna's macrobiotic nutritionist, she is back to a size eight. But her weight yo-yos - 'You have to be thin all the time to make it as an actress,' she says. 'But my rock weight is 20 or 30lb more than my film weight.' She juggles the two careers. 'Performing on stage is like great sex,' she tells me. 'Of course you want to be known for giving the best blowjob in town, but you also want to get yours, too.' She has a new album out in the spring and film projects in the pipeline, trying to regain some of the form she lost since her Golden Globe-nominated role in The People vs Larry Flynt (1996) and her equally good performance in Man on the Moon (1999) opposite Jim Carrey. Actually, it's three careers if you include the fashion thing: 'Givenchy is like me,' she says. 'A legendary brand that has had its ups and downs.'

Love's own childhood had no stability whatsoever. A social-services report details the eight different institutions where she was held in care between 1978 and 1980. Her case folder bore the phrase: 'Parents' whereabouts unknown'. Aged 16, she became a stripper.

Does she consciously avoid repeating the mistakes her own parents made? 'Oh my God, so much. We went to Trudie and Sting's the other night, because Trudie has a daughter who is Franny's age, but it was hard. For one thing, they were going to see the film Control and I wanted to show Frances that she could go out in London without a nanny or a bodyguard, so they went by themselves. I wanted to get her a cake because it is the first time she has gone anywhere on her own. She came back so disturbed because - daaa! - I forgot what the movie was about [the suicide of the lead singer of Joy Division]. Anyway, Sting was there and he was reading his book, and there were all their other kids there who had a mom and a dad, and Franny felt the odd one out.' She wipes her tears. 'I'm sorry. I just want things to be good for her, but she's a lot like me and a lot like her dad. I think she got the best of both of us, so there's that.'

Good cheekbones, I imagine. 'Yeah, she is a very good-looking girl. I don't want to put her in a burka. But I want to protect her from your tabloid press.

Click here to read the entire interview.