‘Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ Tina Turner Has Passed Away at 83

‘Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ Tina Turner Has Passed Away at 83
@Tina Turner

The legendary singer, Tina Turner, has passed away peacefully Today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland.

“Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, in the rural Tennessee community of Nutbush. Her father worked on a farm and her mother left the family when the singer was 11 years old, when she was a teenager, she moved to St. Louis to rejoin her mom. Then, Ike Turner discovered her at age 17 when she grabbed the mic to sing at his club show in St. Louis in 1957. The band leader later recorded a hit song, “A Fool In Love,” with his protégé and gave her the stage name Tina Turner, before the two married in Tijuana, Mexico.

Ike & Tina Turner made one of the most electrifying music of the 1960s, serving up high octane covers of “Proud Mary,” “Come Together,” and “I Want to Take You Higher.” But her tumultuous marriage to musical partner Ike subjected her to brutal acts of physical and psychological abuse in the 1960s and 1970s. She described bruised eyes, busted lips, a broken jaw and other injuries that repeatedly sent her to the emergency room.

In 1980’s, after striking out on her own as a solo artist in the ’70s, Turner reinvented herself as a star of the MTV age, notching hits with “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” “The Best,” and “Private Dancer” — becoming one of the highest-selling female artists on the planet in the process. In 1985, Turner gave a fictional turn to her reputation as a survivor. She played the ruthless leader of an outpost in a nuclear wasteland, acting opposite Mel Gibson in the third installment in the Mad Max franchise, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” Then, her survival and harrowing escape was dramatized in the 1193 film, “What’s Love Got to Do with It” starring Angela Bassett.

Boasting one of the longest careers in rock history, Turner scored Billboard Top 40 hits across four decades, earning her Grammys, a Kennedy Center Honor, and entry into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

Since 1994 the American-born singer had been living in Switzerland with her husband, German actor and music producer Erwin Bach, earning her Swiss citizenship in 2013. In recent years she battled a number of serious health problems, including a stroke, intestinal cancer and total kidney failure that required an organ transplant.

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