• Music Tina Turner Dies at 83
  • Family Roonie Turner, Tina Turner's Son, Dies at 62
  • Tragedy Tina Turner's eldest son, Craig Raymond Turner, found dead at 59

"Tina Turner, the 'Queen of Rock'n Roll' has passed away peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness at her home in Küsnacht, near Zurich, Switzerland," said her representative in statements collected by Sky News and TheTelegraph, both media have paid tribute to what Turner has meant for music: "A legend". But his personal life was marked by darkness.

His childhood in Nutbush (Tennessee, United States) was so miserable that he used to eat four-leaf clovers to see if his luck changed. Anna Mae grew up in poverty, although she did not lack food; As a child she picked cotton and strawberries and at the age of eight she entered the church choir where she attracted attention for her prodigious voice. That helped her escape bullying, a broken home, the abandonment of her parents and the authority of a grandmother who forbade her to go out with her first boyfriend from high school.

Her mother saw in her a future nurse or teacher, but her young daughter wanted other challenges. After working as a nursing assistant, at age 17 she met Ike Turner at a local in Saint Louis, who soon hired her as a vocalist for his band Kings of Rhythm. He bought her clothes, fixed her teeth, changed her hair and named her Tina Turner. In 1958, at age 18, she became Craig's mother after a brief relationship with Raymond Hill, the group's saxophonist, whose first major success was A Fool in Love in 1960, the same year her second son, Ronald, was born.

In one of his iconic showsGTRES

Two years later, Tina and Ike married in Tijuana and the singer adopted the two offspring from a previous relationship of her husband, Ike and Michael. She became pregnant again, but miscarried when she learned the singer was expecting a baby with another woman.

The duo Ike and Tina was as well known as Sonny & Cher, with the aggravating circumstance that Ike was addicted to cocaine and tremendously violent. During her marriage, Tina suffered gender-based violence. The beatings he gave him caused broken jaw, lips, dislocated joints, eyes full of bruises, wounds on his face after throwing boiling coffee and even before going out to sing on more than one occasion he had to swallow his own blood. Tina attempted suicide. The couple's big hit was their version of Proud Mary (1971).
Aware that her life was hell, she abandoned her husband as best she could. After the divorce in 1978 he found some inner peace in Buddhist chants, he was penniless, in debt and without a home.

Greeting the pressGTRES

He started from scratch in Las Vegas cabarets and thanks to the help of producer and manager Roger Davis, his solo career took off with Private Dancer in 1984 at age 45, especially with the song What's Love Got to Do With It. Age was never a problem for Tina, who ended up consolidating herself as the rock tigress with the most beautiful legs in history. It was in Europe where they made her the star she is today, but then the United States knew how to value her. Her love for the old continent caused her to renounce her American citizenship to settle in a magnificent mansion in Switzerland, where she lived with her husband Erwin Bach, a music producer 12 years younger whom she met by chance at a German airport in 1985.

Erwin Bach and Turner in 2004GTRES

The albums Break Every Rule and Foreign Affair are also among the best sellers of his long career that has been awarded with eight Grammys. Possessing a fortune of 250 million dollars, the actress retired from the public scene in 2009 after the Tina! 50th Anniversary tour.

Since then he loved to rest in his mansion overlooking Lake Zurich or on his property on the Côte d'Azur, loved to travel around the world, went crazy when he saw his two grandchildren and actively collaborated in solidarity actions against abuse, helped children and research into different diseases.

But his misfortune didn't end with Ike. In 2018 he suffered another blow when his firstborn, Craig, took his own life at age 59.

  • music

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Learn more