Legendary singer and performer Tina Turner has died at age 83, multiple outlets report. BBC reported that the icon had suffered a number of health issues in recent years, including cancer, a stroke, and kidney failure.
Born Anna Mae Bullock in Tennessee, Turner rose to fame alongside ex-husband Ike Turner in the 1960s with hits like “River Deep, Mountain High” and “Proud Mary.” The Turners—amidst Ike’s rampant abuse—divorced in 1978, and Turner went on to find even greater success as a solo artist in the 1980s, earning the moniker “the Queen of Rock ‘n Roll.”
Turner was inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in 2021 as a solo artist, after first being inducted in 1991 alongside her ex-husband. She won eight Grammy Awards. Upon her solo induction, the Hall of Fame noted, per BBC, how Turner had “expanded the once-limited idea of how a Black woman could conquer a stage and be both a powerhouse and a multidimensional being.”
Turner married a second time in 2013 to German music executive Erwin Bac, who she began dating in the 1980s. They lived in Switzerland, and he donated a kidney to her in 2017 after it was discovered she was suffering from kidney failure. Her life is memorialized in the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It starring Angela Bassett, and Tina: The Musical on stage. She was also the subject of the 2021 HBO documentary Tina.
“People think my life has been tough, but I think it’s been a wonderful journey,” she told Marie Claire South Africa in 2018. “The older you get, the more you realize it’s not what happened, it’s how you deal with it.”
There will never be another.
