As reported by the BBC on Thursday, the artist passed away unexpectedly in a hospital in Portugal while receiving treatment for an illness. Her team announced that the family is "deeply saddened" by the loss of the singer, who last May had undergone an emergency intestinal operation in Portuguese territory that led to an induced coma.
Born as Gaynor Hopkins in 1951, Tyler grew up in a public housing in southern Wales as the fourth of six siblings in a family led by a coal miner. Her iconic husky voice, which became her distinctive and unmistakable trademark, was actually the result of an accident in 1977. After surgery to remove nodules on her vocal cords, the singer screamed in anger breaking the absolute rest ordered by the doctors, altering her tone permanently.
This vocal peculiarity allowed her career to take off definitively in the early 80s when she collaborated with composer Jim Steinman. Together, they created "Total Eclipse of the Heart", a piece that Steinman described as a "Wagnerian onslaught of sound and emotion." The song reached number one in the UK and the US, and today it exceeds 1 billion streams on Spotify.
Bonnie Tyler solidified her star status with other dramatic rock ballads like "Holding Out for a Hero", securing a privileged place in popular culture thanks to her constant presence in movies and series. Throughout her career, she represented the UK in Eurovision 2013 and was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2022. On a personal level, she was married since 1973 to Robert Sullivan, her first serious boyfriend, with whom she maintained a solid marriage for over four decades. With her passing, an artist who managed to fulfill her childhood dream under an artistic name she chose by combining lists from a newspaper disappears.