Bonnie Tyler, the raspy-voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star best known for singing the chart-topping power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in 1983 and who saw a new generation succumb to its bombastic charm during solar and lunar eclipses, has died. She is 75 years old.Taylor’s family said in a statement on Thursday that Taylor died “accidentally” while being treated at a hospital in Portugal. In May, she was hospitalized in Faro, where she has a home, for emergency intestinal surgery and subsequently fell into a coma.Taylor has been nominated for three Grammys, represented the UK at the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest, finishing 19th, and was awarded an OBE in 2023 for services to the music of Queen Elizabeth II, all thanks to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which has been played more than a billion times, driven by real eclipses in 2017 and 2024.The song spent four weeks at No. 1 and the video had more than 1 billion views; when Stereogum re-evaluated it in 2020, the music media declared it an “extinction-level event in musical form.” Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins in public housing in Skieven, Wales, the daughter of a coal miner. She grew up with three sisters and two brothers. She loved the Beatles and her first album was “A Hard Day’s Night.” The first song she bought was “Hippy Hippy Shake” by Swinging Blue Jeans when she was 13, and according to her memoir “Straight From the Heart,” she watched “Top of the Pops” religiously. She would record “Top of the Pops” on a reel-to-reel two-track recorder and write the lyrics to the songs she liked. Her favorites were songs by Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding.In 1977, she released her debut album, The World Starts Tonight, under a new RCA-approved name, Bonnie Tyler, which included her first hit, “Lost in France” and was nominated for a BRIT Award for Breakthrough Artist. She reached No. 3 on the charts in 1978 with “It’s a Heartache,” but quickly disappeared. She later signed with Sony and watched Meat Loaf perform “Bat Out of Hell” on the BBC. She was so impressed that she asked to collaborate with Meat Loaf songwriter and producer Jim Steinman.Steinman introduced her to his song “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which would become the debut single from her fifth studio album, Faster Than the Speed of Night. He borrowed the lyrics “Turn around, bright eyes” from “The Dream Engine,” a 1969 musical he wrote at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He told her the song was from a version of the future musical Nosferatu.“Faster Than the Speed of Night” was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Rock Vocal Performance category, but lost to Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield,” while Taylor’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was nominated again in the Best Pop Vocal Performance category, losing to Erin Cara’s “Flashdance – What a Feeling.”Taylor never reached such heights again, but he still kept up the trend with soundtrack singles, such as “Holding Out For a Hero” from 1984’s Footloose and “Here She Comes” from Metropolis. Taylor is married to real estate developer and former Olympic judoka Robert Sullivan.
