Bonnie Tyler breathed her last on July 8 in Portugal and leaves behind grieving loved ones. But what did we know about the life of the 75-year-old singer with the legendary voice?
Bonnie Tyler will no longer sing. The singer, with a voice recognizable among a thousand, died suddenly on July 8, after underwent an operation for a health problem related to the intestine last May. “Bonnie’s family and team are heartbroken to announce that Bonnie passed away unexpectedly last night in a hospital in Portugal from the illness for which she was being treated“, we read in the press release from his loved ones. What do we know about the legend of the 80s?
What is the cause of Bonnie Tyler’s death?
In early May, the press and fans began to panic: it had just been learned that Bonnie Tyler had undergone emergency intestinal surgery in a hospital in Faro, Portugal. After the operation, the singer was placed in an artificial coma on life support.
Victim of cardiorespiratory arrest, she was then resuscitated. Shortly after, doctors reported that his condition was improving, but remained worrying. It was finally in the hospital that Bonnie Tyler took her last breath after two months spent trying to escape.
What was Bonnie Tyler’s real name?
Gaynor Hopkins, her real name, was born on June 8, 1951 in Wales. She grew up in a devout Protestant family of six children, with a coal miner father and a housewife mother. As a child, she sang for the first time in public in a chapel and then knew she wanted to make it her career.
At 16, she left school and worked in a grocery store while, at the same time, trying to make a name for herself in music. This is how Gaynor Hopkins chose a stage name, in order to avoid being confused with another singer of the time, Mary Hopkin, and initially opted for Sherene Davis.
After founding her own group, Imagination, she performed in bars with it and was eventually discovered by talent scout, Roger Bell. The RCA label, which signed her, then asked her to change her name again. So she took newspapers, made two lists, one of first names and one of last names, and put them together until she found the combination “Bonnie Tyler”.
Did Bonnie Tyler have children?
On July 14, 1973, Bonnie Tyler married British judoka Robert Sullivan, after being his partner for 4 years. He is her first and last love, since it was by his side that she lived the last years of her life. If the singer, who had a miscarriage at 39, wanted to have children, she was never able to grant this wish. “I have a great life. And I have lots of nieces and nephews that I adore, three sisters and two brothers, we are one big Welsh family“, she had however put it into perspective with the Parisian.
Where did Bonnie Tyler live?
The interpreter of Total Eclipse Of The Heart had found his paradise on earth in Portugal. “In 1978 I fell in love with the Algarve, after recording my third album in a villa in Vale do Lobo“, she confided to The Timesin 2019. The singer therefore spent around six months of the year in Albufeira in her superb house and also had a yacht moored in Vilamoura.
But the Welshwoman made sure to visit her native land regularly. “Whatever happens, I always come back to Wales. I have lived in the Swansea area all my life and had my first holiday in Porthcawl. I live in Mumbles now. It’s a beautiful part of the coast. The neighborhood has changed a lot over the years, with many restaurants and bars opening“, she declared.
Why did Bonnie Tyler have that gravelly voice?
After experiencing his first successes, notably with his single Lost in FranceBonnie Tyler went through a difficult ordeal in the mid-70s. Suffering from nodules on her vocal cords, she had surgery and had to try not to speak for six weeks. But the artist did not succeed…
A blessing in disguise since she then inherited a much hoarser voice than before, which gave her this recognizable vocal identity! Shortly after, in 1983, the artist entered legend with her hit Total Eclipse Of The Heartone of the best-selling songs in the world with six million copies.
