![\"Singer](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/singer-bonnie-tyler-performs-her-song-believe-in-me-during-a-UFEMJCDMEJBZFPKKT3MKTSN254.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBonnie Tyler, the gravelly voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star whose 1983 chart-topping power ballad Total Eclipse of the Heart enchanted succeeding generations with its bombastic charms during solar and lunar eclipses, has died. She was 75.<\/p>\n
Tyler died unexpectedly in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said overnight in a statement on her website. She was hospitalised in May in Faro, where she had a home, for emergency intestinal surgery. She had been placed in an induced coma for a period but was reportedly improving last month and expected to make a good recovery.<\/p>\n
\u201cBonnie\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Tyler earned three Grammy nods and in 2013 represented Britain at the Eurovision Song Contest, where she came in 19th. She was honoured as a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2022 for her services to music by Queen Elizabeth II, thanks mainly to Total Eclipse of the Heart, which has had more than 1 billion streams, boosted by real eclipses in 2017 and 2024.<\/p>\n
The song spent four weeks at No. 1, and when Stereogum re-evaluated it in 2020, the music outlet declared it an “extinction-level event rendered in musical form”.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Singer Bonnie Tyler performs her song “Believe in Me” during a rehearsal for the final of the Eurovision Song Contest at the Malmo Arena in Malmo, Sweden on May 17, 2013. (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s pop music as heart-pounding, chest-thumping, blood-gargling, heavens-falling passion explosion. It\u2019s sheer spectacle. It\u2019s fireworks and lasers and lightning and thunder. It soars and swoops and barrel-rolls,” the site said.<\/p>\n
The song has never really gone away: it was 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 in a wedding scene in 2003\u2019s \u201cOld School\u201d and One Direction sang it in 2010 on a UK version of The X Factor.<\/p>\n
Early life<\/p>\n
Tyler was born \u2014 as Gaynor Hopkins \u2014 a coal miner\u2019s daughter in public housing with an outside toilet in Skewen, Wales, about 11km outside Swansea. She grew up with three sisters and two brothers.<\/p>\n
She adored the Beatles and her first album was A Hard Day\u2019s Night. The first song she bought, at 13, was Hippy Hippy Shake by the Swinging Blue Jeans and she watched \u201cTop of the Pops\u201d religiously, according to her memoir, \u201cStraight From the Heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 by Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding.<\/p>\n
“I used to sing them into my hairbrush for hours and hours, and that\u2019s 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\u2019t think much of it. I thought everyone\u2019s voices were different from each other\u2019s,” she wrote.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
![\"Singer](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/singer-bonnie-tyler-performs-her-song-believe-in-me-during-a-VYUQNCHE3JC3NMHYG3SWJCUJPQ.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Singer Bonnie Tyler performs her song “Believe in Me” during a rehearsal for the final of the Eurovision Song Contest at the Malmo Arena in Malmo, Sweden on May 17, 2013. (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n
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 Brit Awards. She then had a No. 3 hit in 1978 with It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Total Eclipse of the Heart<\/p>\n
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\u2019s lyrics \u2014 “Turn around, bright eyes” \u2014 from his 1969 musical The Dream Engine, written when he was a student at Massachusetts’ Amherst College. He told her the song was from a prospective musical version of Nosferatu.<\/p>\n
“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. \u201cHe gave me a cassette to listen to in my hotel and we both preferred take two.”<\/p>\n
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\u2019s only love in the dark,” she sings.<\/p>\n
The video, a staple of early-days MTV, was shot in a frightening gothic former asylum in Surrey, where the guard dogs apparently wouldn\u2019t set foot in the rooms downstairs where they used to give people electric shock treatment. The visuals included slow-motion tossed doves, candles, dancing ninjas, dancing greasers, Tyler in frighteningly big shoulder pads, fencers, gymnasts, wind machines and shirtless boys wearing swim goggles being doused with water.<\/p>\n
Faster Than the Speed of Night earned a Grammy nomination for best rock vocal performance \u2014 losing to Pat Benatar\u2019s Love Is a Battlefield \u2014 and Tyler got another nod for Total Eclipse of the Heart in the best pop vocal performance category, losing to Irene Cara\u2019s Flashdance \u2014 What a Feeling.<\/p>\n
After the Eclipse<\/p>\n
Tyler never reached such dizzying heights again but stayed current with such movie soundtrack singles as Holding Out For a Hero \u2014 from 1984\u2019s Footloose \u2014 and Here She Comes from Metropolis also in 1984.<\/p>\n
Her 2019 disc Between the Earth and the Stars featured duets with Rod Stewart, Cliff Richard and Status Quo\u2019s Francis Rossi, and she ended that year performing a Vatican Christmas concert before Pope Francis.<\/p>\n
In 2013, she switched gears to make a country-flavoured record in Nashville, Rocks and Honey, which included the Vince Gill duet What You Need From Me and a little ballad called Believe in Me, written by American songwriter Desmond Child and British songwriters Lauren Christy and Christopher Braide. Believe in Me was picked to represent the United Kingdom at that year\u2019s Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was an absolutely wonderful atmosphere there,\u201d 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!”<\/p>\n
In 2017, she joined Joe Jonas’ band DNCE for a performance on the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas as part of a Total Eclipse Cruise. When the moon passed in front of the sun, they played Total Eclipse of the Heart.<\/p>\n
Tyler was married to property developer and former Olympic judo competitor Robert Sullivan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bonnie Tyler, the gravelly voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star whose 1983 chart-topping power ballad Total Eclipse of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,64,69,1745],"class_list":["post-518098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-north-america","tag-nz","tag-uk-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}