The unbreakable Tina Turner: Rock & Roll icon, domestic abuse survivor, dies at 83
Rock icon Tina Turner, known for hits including What’s Love Got to Do with It and Simply the Best, has died in Switzerland at the age of 83 after a long illness, her publicist says.
Tina Turner and Mick Jagger perform at the Live Aid concert Saturday night in Philadelphia on July 13, 1995. Turner has died at 83. (AP-Photo/Amy Sancetta, File)
The US-born singer came from humble beginnings in the state of Tennessee to reach global super-stardom.
She was admired for overcoming her abusive 16-year marriage with performing partner Ike Turner to find solo-career success in her mid-40s.
She had rose to fame as a duo with Ike in the 1960s and ’70s.
Hits like River Deep – Mountain High and Nutbush City Limits stormed the charts in several countries.
As Turner revealed much later, the marriage was torture for her, with Ike beating and bullying her.
She eventually fled from him at the age of 37.
She gave up all financial claims to the music they jointly created in order to get through the divorce quickly and launch the next chapter of her career.
In a career spanning more than 60 years, Turner won eight competitive Grammy Awards and has a star on both the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the St Louis Walk of Fame.
She duetted at the Grammys with Beyonce for a rendition of Proud Mary which featured both the powerful singers, in sparkly outfits, mirroring each other’s choreography.
Other notable duets through her career included performing with David Bowie, Sir Mick Jagger and Jimmy Barnes.
At the age of 45, she shone in the spotlight with the album Private Dancer, her solo breakthrough in 1984.
From then on she filled stadiums and music stages all over the world.
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s the “Queen of Rock and Roll” thrilled audiences with her powerful voice, daring costumes, sexy dance routines and boundless energy.
She landed numerous hits, from What’s Love Got To Do With It? and Proud Mary to We Don’t Need Another Hero and Simply the Best to name a few.
After a farewell tour in 2009, she retired into private life and later became a Swiss citizen.
With her German partner Erwin Bach, a record company manager who was 16 years her junior, she had lived on Lake Zurich since the 1990s.
They married in 2013 at a lavish wedding at their lakeside villa.
In 2021 she was inducted into the US Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
“If they’re still giving me awards at 81, I must have done something right,” she joked at the ceremony via video link from Switzerland.
Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock to a sharecropper family on November 26, 1939, had suffered from colon cancer and kidney failure.
Her husband donated one of his kidneys to her in 2017.
In the autobiography My Love Story in 2018 she wrote about the many painful experiences in her life but honoured Bach as her saviour and her greatest love.
with Reuters
