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 and seeing new generations succumb to its bombastic charms during solar and lunar eclipses, has died. She was 75.Tyler died “unexpectedly” in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said Thursday in a statement. She was hospitalised in May in Faro, where she had a home, for emergency intestinal surgery and was later placed in an induced coma.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 thanks to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, which has had more than one 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 re-evaluated it in 2020, the music outlet declared it an “extinction-level event rendered in musical form”. Tyler was born – as Gaynor Hopkins – a coal miner’s daughter in public housing in Skewen, Wales. 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 she 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 favourites were songs by Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding.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”.“Faster Than the Speed of Night” earned a Grammy nomination for best rock vocal performance – losing to Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” – and Tyler got another nod for “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in the best pop vocal performance category, losing to Irene Cara’s “Flashdance – What a Feeling.”Tyler never reached such heights again but stayed current with such movie soundtrack singles as “Holding Out For a Hero” – from 1984’s “Footloose” – and “Here She Comes” from “Metropolis”. Tyler was married to property developer and former Olympic judo competitor Robert Sullivan.
