Bonnie Tyler, a Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star best known for her chart-topping power ballad Total Eclipse of the Heart, has died at the age of 75. She was being treated for an illness in a hospital in Portugal where she unexpectedly passed away last night. Tyler earned three Grammy nods and was awarded an MBE for her services to music by Queen Elizabeth II in 2023.
Bonnie Tyler, the gravelly voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star best known for singing the chart-topping power ballad Total Eclipse of the Heart in 1983 has died at the age of 75.
Tyler died unexpectedly in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said. She was hospitalized in May in Faro, where she had a home, for emergency intestinal surgery and was later placed in an induced coma. Bonnie's family and team are heartbroken to announce that Bonnie unexpectedly passed away last night in hospital in Portugal as a result of the illness that she was being treated for, her family said.
Tyler earned three Grammy nods, represented Britain at the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 where she came in 19th and was awarded an MBE for her services to music by Queen Elizabeth II in 2023, all largely thanks to Total Eclipse of the Heart, which has had more than 1 billion streams, boosted by real eclipses in 2017 and 2024. The song spent four weeks at No. 1, the video has surpassed 1 billion views and when Stereogum reevaluated it in 2020, the music outlet declared it an extinction-level event rendered in musical form.
It's pop music as heart-pounding, chest-thumping, blood-gargling, heavens-falling passion explosion. It's sheer spectacle. It's fireworks and lasers and lightning and thunder. It soars and swoops and barrel-rolls, the site said.
The song has never really gone away, covered by the English singer Nicki French in 1995 and the band Westlife in 2006. Cate Blanchett sang it while hitting Billy Bob Thornton with her car in 2001's Bandits, it appeared at a wedding scene in 2003's Old School and One Direction sang it in 2010 on a U.K. version of The X Factor.
Tyler was born as Gaynor Hopkins a coal miner's daughter in public housing with an outside toilet in Skewen, Wales, about seven miles outside Swansea. She grew up with three sisters and two brothers. She adored the Beatles and her first album was A Hard Day's Night. The first song she bought was Hippy Hippy Shake by the Swinging Blue Jeans at 13 and watched Top of the Pops religiously, according to her memoir Straight From the Heart.
She would record Top of the Pops on a reel-to-reel two-track recorder and write down the lyrics of songs she loved. Her favorites were songs by Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding. I used to sing them into my hairbrush for hours and hours, and that's how it all started for me. I fell in love with singing just from doing that.
Looking back, even then my voice had a husky tone to it, but I didn't think much of it. I thought everyone's voices were different from each other's, she wrote. In 1976 she had to have surgery to remove nodules on her throat, leaving her with that trademark vocal sound. Changing her name to Sherene Davis, she was fronting a soul band when she was discovered by talent scout Roger Bell, who brought her to London for demo sessions.
Then she waited for a label until RCA said it was interested. Under her new RCA-sanctioned name Bonnie Tyler, her debut album The World Starts Tonight in 1977 contained her first chart hit Lost in France and she was nominated for a breakthrough artists award at the Brits Awards. She then had a No. 3 hit in 1978 with It's a Heartache, but soon drifted.
She then signed with Sony and saw Meat Loaf perform Bat Out of Hell on the BBC. Impressed, she requested to work with Meat Loaf songwriter and producer Jim Steinman. Steinman introduced her to his song Total Eclipse of the Heart, which would become the debut single for her fifth studio album Faster Than the Speed of Night.
He borrowed one of the song's lyrics Turn around, bright eyes from his 1969 musical The Dream Engine written as a student at Massachusetts' Amherst College. He told her the song was from a prospective musical version of Nosferatu. Jim liked to put down a basic rhythm track, do nine takes of the song, choose the best one and then put the kitchen sink on there, like Phil Spector used to, Tyler told The Guardian in 2023.
He gave me a cassette to listen to in my hotel and we both preferred take two. Featuring E Street Band members Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums, Total Eclipse is a rumination on lost love Once upon a time there was light in my life but now there's only love in the dark, she sing
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