English songbird, Bonnie Tyler dies at 75

Britain’s Bonnie Taylor, who rose to stardom in the 1980s has died at age 75.

Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins in South Wales in 1951, the fourth of six children of a coal miner and a homemaker. She is best-known for her single, “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which flaunted her husky sound and won her a Grammy Award nomination. After an operation to remove vocal cord nodules in 1977, Tyler was ordered to rest her voice but one day she screamed in anger, permanently altering it. 

Six years on, the Welsh singer would release “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and later, “Holding Out for a Hero”, another dramatic rock ballad, which helped her make her mark on Britain’s pop scene. Both recordings have since featured in films, television shows and advertisements. 

Tyler, whose releases also included “It’s a Heartache” and “Lost in France.”‘ She grew up in a four-bed council house with a large garden in the village of Skewen, 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.

At seven, Tyler went to see a musical at the local church. There she fell in love with Irving Berlin’s song “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, first giving the shy child the desire to perform. She started out as a teenage backing singer before releasing several albums of her own in the 1970s.

Big commercial break

But it wasn’t until the early 1980s, when she started working with American lyricist Jim Steinman, that she had her commercial breakthrough. She ‌won over ⁠Steinman, then already famous for composing “Bat out of Hell” for Meat Loaf, by sending him demos of the theatrical rock songs she knew would suit her voice.

From the 1990s onwards, Tyler had more success in Norway, Austria and France than at home, although she represented ⁠Britain in the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest, and was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire, for services to music, in 2022.

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.