Bonnie Tyler, the Grammy-nominated Welsh singer whose raspy voice made “Total Eclipse of the Heart” one of the most recognizable power ballads of the 1980s, died unexpectedly in Portugal after being treated for an illness.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh pop singer whose gravelly voice powered the 1983 No. 1 hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and kept the song alive for generations through films, covers, television performances and real-life 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 posted on her website. She had been hospitalized in May in Faro, where she had a home, for emergency intestinal surgery. She was placed in an induced coma for a period but had reportedly been improving last month and was expected to recover.
“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’s career spanned decades, but she was best known for “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a dramatic power ballad that spent four weeks at No. 1 and eventually surpassed 1 billion streams. The song gained renewed attention during solar and lunar eclipses, including major surges tied to eclipses in 2017 and 2024.
Her career also brought three Grammy nominations, a 2013 appearance representing Britain at the Eurovision Song Contest and a 2022 honor from Queen Elizabeth II, who made Tyler a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to music.
In a 2020 retrospective, Stereogum described “Total Eclipse of the Heart” as 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 outlet wrote.
The song remained a pop-culture fixture long after its release. English singer Nicki French covered it in 1995, and Westlife covered it in 2006. Cate Blanchett sang it while hitting Billy Bob Thornton with her car in the 2001 film “Bandits.” It appeared in a wedding scene in the 2003 comedy “Old School,” and One Direction performed it in 2010 on the U.K. version of “The X Factor.”
Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins in Skewen, Wales, about 7 miles outside Swansea. She was the daughter of a coal miner and grew up in public housing with an outside toilet, along with three sisters and two brothers.
Music became central to her early life. She adored the Beatles, and her first album was “A Hard Day’s Night.” At 13, the first song she bought was “Hippy Hippy Shake” by the Swinging Blue Jeans. She watched “Top of the Pops” devotedly, according to her memoir, “Straight From the Heart.”
Tyler wrote that she recorded “Top of the Pops” on a reel-to-reel two-track recorder and copied down the lyrics to songs she loved. Her favorites included 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.
Her distinctive rasp became more pronounced after 1976 surgery to remove nodules from her throat. By then, she had changed her name to Sherene Davis and was fronting a soul band when talent scout Roger Bell discovered her and brought her to London for demo sessions. RCA later showed interest.
Under the RCA-approved name Bonnie Tyler, she released her debut album, “The World Starts Tonight,” in 1977. The record included her first chart hit, “Lost in France,” and helped earn her a nomination for a breakthrough artist award at the Brit Awards. She followed with a No. 3 hit in 1978, “It’s a Heartache,” before her career slowed.
After signing with Sony, Tyler saw Meat Loaf perform “Bat Out of Hell” on the BBC and asked to work with Jim Steinman, the songwriter and producer behind Meat Loaf’s signature sound.
Steinman introduced her to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which became the debut single from her fifth studio album, “Faster Than the Speed of Night.” He borrowed the lyric “Turn around, bright eyes” from his 1969 student musical “The Dream Engine,” written at Massachusetts’ Amherst College. He told Tyler the song came 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.”
The recording featured E Street Band members Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums. Its lyrics cast heartbreak in sweeping, cinematic terms, including the line, “Once upon a time there was light in my life/But now there’s only love in the dark.”
The video became a staple of MTV’s early years. It was filmed in a gothic former asylum in Surrey, where guard dogs reportedly refused to enter downstairs rooms once used for electric shock treatment. The visuals included slow-motion doves, candles, dancing ninjas, greasers, fencers, gymnasts, wind machines, Tyler in oversized shoulder pads and shirtless boys wearing swim goggles while being sprayed with water.
“Faster Than the Speed of Night” earned Tyler a Grammy nomination for best rock vocal performance, which she lost to Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield.” “Total Eclipse of the Heart” also earned her a Grammy nomination for best pop vocal performance, which went to Irene Cara’s “Flashdance — What a Feeling.”
Tyler never again matched the commercial peak of “Total Eclipse,” but she remained active in music and continued recording soundtrack singles. Her best-known later songs included “Holding Out For a Hero” from the 1984 film “Footloose” and “Here She Comes” from “Metropolis,” also released in 1984.
She continued releasing music into the 21st century. Her 2019 album, “Between the Earth and the Stars,” featured duets with Rod Stewart, Cliff Richard and Status Quo’s Francis Rossi. She ended that year performing at a Vatican Christmas concert before Pope Francis.
Tyler also shifted into country-flavored material with the 2013 Nashville-recorded album “Rocks and Honey.” The record included the Vince Gill duet “What You Need From Me” and “Believe in Me,” a ballad written by Desmond Child, Lauren Christy and Christopher Braide. “Believe in Me” was selected as the United Kingdom’s entry for the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden, where Tyler finished 19th.
“It was an absolutely wonderful atmosphere there,” she told the San Francisco Examiner in 2023. “I was being interviewed every 15, 20 minutes, and when I walked out onstage behind the British flag, I thought the roof was going to come off! It was awesome, just awesome!”
In 2017, Tyler joined DNCE, Joe Jonas’ band, aboard the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas for a “Total Eclipse Cruise.” As the moon passed in front of the sun, they performed “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
Tyler was married to Robert Sullivan, a property developer and former Olympic judo competitor.
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