Bonnie Tyler, known for her distinctive gravelly voice and the hit song "Total Eclipse of the Heart", has died at the age of 75, BBC News reported on Thursday.
The unusual quality of Tyler's voice came after an accident. Following an operation to remove vocal cord nodules in 1977, she was advised to rest her voice. However, after screaming in anger one day, her voice changed permanently.
Six years later, the Welsh singer released "Total Eclipse of the Heart", a song that highlighted her husky vocals and earned a Grammy Award nomination. Another major hit, "Holding Out for a Hero", was released soon after and helped establish her place in Britain's pop music scene. Both songs later appeared in films, television shows and advertisements.
Tyler, whose other popular releases included "It's a Heartache" and "Lost in France", was born Gaynor Hopkins in south Wales in 1951. She was the fourth of six children born to a coal miner father and homemaker mother.
Early life and rise to fame
Tyler grew up in a four-bed council house with a large garden in Skewen village, outside Swansea. "I think Mam and Dad had it really hard, bringing up a big family on very little," she told The Guardian newspaper in 2012.
Music played an important role in her childhood, with songs often heard on the family radiogram or sung by her mother, who performed opera numbers and "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini" while doing household chores.
At the age of seven, Tyler watched a musical at a local church and was inspired by Irving Berlin's song "There's No Business Like Show Business". The experience sparked her desire to perform.
"I wouldn't say boo to a goose, and yet there was a part of me that yearned to sing in front of people," she recalled in her memoir, "Straight from the Heart".
She began her career as a teenage backing singer before releasing her own albums in the 1970s. Her major breakthrough came in the early 1980s after she began working with American lyricist Jim Steinman.
Global success and personal life
Tyler impressed Steinman, who was already known for composing "Bat out of Hell" for Meat Loaf, by sending him demos of theatrical rock songs she believed matched her voice.
Recalling the first time she heard his composition, "Total Eclipse", Tyler said: "I knew this was the song I had been waiting for all my life." Her recording of the track, described by Steinman as a "Wagnerian-like onslaught of sound and emotion", went on to top charts in both the UK and US.
The song's lyrics, "Once upon a time, I was falling in love, But now I'm only falling apart," helped it become a global favourite, with the track later crossing more than one billion streams on Spotify.
It also featured in films including "Old School" and "Bandits", television shows such as "Glee" and "Grey's Anatomy", and a Mastercard advertisement.
From the 1990s onwards, Tyler found greater success in Norway, Austria and France than in Britain. She represented Britain at the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest and was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2022 for her contribution to music.
Tyler married property developer Robert Sullivan, her first serious boyfriend, in 1973. "I am still very much in love with him and he with me," she said 40 years later. The couple did not have children.
Tyler did not particularly like her birth name. Explaining how she chose her stage name, she told BBC Radio Wales: "I got a broadsheet newspaper and I made an effort to write all the first names I came across on one list and all the surnames on another and I went through them both and came up with Bonnie Tyler."
