Highlights
- Bonnie Tyler, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” singer, has died at 75 in Portugal.
- Family says her death followed weeks of treatment after a burst appendix.
- Tributes pour in from UK PM’s office, Welsh officials and music world.
Bonnie Tyler is dead. The Welsh singer behind the unforgettable power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” passed away Wednesday night in a hospital in Portugal. She was 75.
Tyler’s family and team said they were “heartbroken to announce that Bonnie unexpectedly passed away” in a statement shared through her manager, Matt Davis. The statement, posted to her official social media accounts, said the death came “as a result of the illness that she was being treated for.”
The music world is reeling.
Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins in Wales in 1951 and grew up in a working-class family, dropping out of school at just 16. She was raised in public housing with an outside toilet in the small town of Skewen, about seven miles outside Swansea, the daughter of a Welsh coal miner.
Her death comes weeks after a health scare that began during a concert in London, where doctors initially couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong. She later traveled to Portugal’s Algarve region, where her condition took a terrifying turn.
Longtime family friend Liberto Mealha told a Portuguese outlet that “she began to feel severe abdominal pain” after arriving in the Algarve. Her appendix had burst, and she was rushed into emergency surgery at a hospital in Faro.
In May, Tyler was placed into a medically induced coma to aid her recovery, and reportedly went into cardiac arrest when doctors first attempted to bring her out of it. She had emerged from that coma last month after undergoing surgery to treat a perforated intestine.
Her longtime representative, music executive Judd Lander, praised her spirit in a statement Thursday. “Bonnie was unique, she was a one-off, great sense of humor, a stunning voice and great stage presence,” he said, adding, “The world has lost one hell of a great talent!”
Tyler’s career took off after she signed with RCA Records in 1975, and a vocal nodule surgery two years later gave her already husky voice the raspy roar that became her calling card.
She dropped hit after hit through the late 1970s, including “Lost in France,” before her career reached new heights when she teamed up with producer Jim Steinman. Steinman penned her two biggest anthems, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “Holding Out for a Hero,” off her 1983 album “Faster Than the Speed of Night.”
Tyler was a three-time Grammy nominee and continued touring and releasing music for decades, with other well-known tracks including “If You Were a Woman,” “Straight From the Heart” and “Making Love.”
Tyler had no children of her own. She miscarried at the age of 39.
Tributes poured in from across the political and entertainment world within hours of the news breaking. A spokesman for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “saddened” by her death, calling her “one of Britain’s greatest recording artists.” Wales’ secretary of state, Jo Stevens, remembered her as a “Welsh music icon.”
Fans have already begun gathering outside her Swansea home to lay flowers, and “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is once again climbing streaming charts as listeners revisit her catalog.
