Bonnie Tyler, beloved British rock legend, dies at 75

LONDON,— Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh singer known for her rough, gravelly voice, has died at 75, BBC News reported Thursday.

Her distinctive sound came from an accident. In 1977, doctors removed nodules from her vocal cords and told her to rest her voice. She screamed one day out of anger, and the injury changed her voice permanently.

Six years later, Tyler released “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” the song that made her famous. It showed off her rough voice and earned a Grammy nomination.

She followed it with “Holding Out for a Hero,” another big rock ballad, which helped her become a major name in British pop music. Both songs have appeared in films, TV shows and commercials since then.

Tyler also released “It’s a Heartache” and “Lost in France” during her career.

Born Gaynor Hopkins in south Wales in 1951, Tyler was the fourth of six children. Her father worked as a coal miner and her mother stayed home.

The family lived in a four-bedroom council house with a large garden in Skewen, near Swansea. She told The Guardian in 2012 that her parents had a hard time raising a large family with little money.

Music filled her childhood home. Her mother sang while doing housework, and the family listened to records.

At age seven, Tyler saw a musical at her local church and heard Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” That moment sparked her wish to perform, despite being a shy child.

In her memoir, “Straight from the Heart,” she wrote that she was too shy to speak up but still wanted to sing in front of people.

Tyler worked as a backing singer as a teenager before releasing solo albums in the 1970s.

Her big break came in the early 1980s when she began working with American songwriter Jim Steinman, who had already written “Bat Out of Hell” for Meat Loaf.

She sent him demo recordings, and he agreed to write for her.

Tyler said she knew right away that “Total Eclipse” was the song she had waited for her whole career.

The song topped charts in both Britain and the United States and has been streamed more than one billion times on Spotify.

It later appeared in the films “Old School” and “Bandits,” the TV shows “Glee” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” and a Mastercard ad.

After the 1990s, Tyler found more success in Norway, Austria and France than in Britain. Still, she represented the UK in the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest and received an MBE for services to music in 2022.

She married property developer Robert Sullivan in 1973 and said decades later she remained in love with him. The couple had no children.

Tyler disliked her birth name. She told BBC Radio Wales she picked her stage name by writing down first names and surnames from a newspaper and combining them into Bonnie Tyler.

(With files from Reuters)