Bonnie Tyler, who topped the charts with epic 'Total Eclipse of the
Heart,' has died at 75
[July 09, 2026]
By MARK KENNEDY
LONDON (AP) — Bonnie Tyler, the gravelly voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh
pop star best known for singing the chart-topping power ballad “Total
Eclipse of the Heart” in 1983 and seeing new generations succumb to its
bombastic charms during solar and lunar eclipses, has died. She was 75.
Tyler died “unexpectedly” in a hospital in Portugal where she was being
treated for an illness, her family said Thursday in a statement on her
website. She was hospitalized in May in Faro, where she had a home, for
emergency intestinal surgery and was later placed in an induced coma.
“Bonnie’s family and team are heartbroken to announce that Bonnie
unexpectedly passed away last night in hospital in Portugal as a result
of the illness that she was being treated for, her family said.
Tyler earned three Grammy nods, represented Britain at the Eurovision
Song Contest 2013 — where she came in 19th — and was awarded an MBE for
her services to music by Queen Elizabeth II in 2023, all largely thanks
to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which has had more that 1 billion
streams, boosted by real eclipses in 2017 and 2024.
The song spent four weeks at No. 1, the video has surpassed 1 billion
views and when Stereogum reevaluated it in 2020, the music outlet
declared it an “extinction-level event rendered in musical form.”
“It’s pop music as heart-pounding, chest-thumping, blood-gargling,
heavens-falling passion explosion. It’s sheer spectacle. It’s fireworks
and lasers and lightning and thunder. It soars and swoops and
barrel-rolls,” the site said.
The song has never really gone away, covered by the English singer Nicki
French in 1995 and the band Westlife in 2006. Cate Blanchett sang it
while hitting Billy Bob Thornton with her car in 2001’s “Bandits,” it
appeared at a wedding scene in 2003’s “Old School” and One Direction
sang it in 2010 on a U.K. version of “The X Factor.”
Early life
Tyler was born — as Gaynor Hopkins — a coal miner’s daughter in public
housing with an outside toilet in Skewen, Wales, about seven miles
outside Swansea. She grew up with three sisters and two brothers.
She adored the Beatles and her first album was “A Hard Day’s Night.” The
first song she bought was “Hippy Hippy Shake” by the Swinging Blue Jeans
at 13 and watched “Top of the Pops” religiously, according to her
memoir, “Straight From the Heart.”
She would record “Top of the Pops” on a reel-to-reel two-track recorder
and write down the lyrics of songs she loved. Her favorites were songs
by Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Otis
Redding.
“I used to sing them into my hairbrush for hours and hours, and that’s
how it all started for me. I fell in love with singing just from doing
that. Looking back, even then my voice had a husky tone to it, but I
didn’t think much of it. I thought everyone’s voices were different from
each other’s,” she wrote.
In 1976 she had to have surgery to remove nodules on her throat, leaving
her with that trademark vocal sound. Changing her name to Sherene Davis,
she was fronting a soul band when she was discovered by talent scout
Roger Bell, who brought her to London for demo sessions. Then she waited
for a label until RCA said it was interested.
Under her new RCA-sanctioned name Bonnie Tyler, her debut album “The
World Starts Tonight” in 1977 contained her first chart hit, “Lost in
France,” and she was nominated for a breakthrough artists award at the
Brits Awards. She then had a No. 3 hit in 1978 with “It’s a Heartache,”
but soon drifted. She then signed with Sony and saw Meat Loaf perform
“Bat Out of Hell” on the BBC. Impressed, she requested to work with Meat
Loaf songwriter and producer Jim Steinman.
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Singer Bonnie Tyler performs her song "Believe in Me" during a
rehearsal for the final of the Eurovision Song Contest at the Malmo
Arena in Malmo, Sweden on May 17, 2013. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant,
File)
 ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’
Steinman introduced her to his song “Total Eclipse of the Heart,”
which would become the debut single for her fifth studio album,
“Faster Than the Speed of Night.” He borrowed one of the song’s
lyrics — “Turn around, bright eyes” — from his 1969 musical “The
Dream Engine” written as a student at Massachusetts’ Amherst
College. He told her the song was from a prospective musical version
of “Nosferatu.”
“Jim liked to put down a basic rhythm track, do nine takes of the
song, choose the best one and then put the kitchen sink on there,
like Phil Spector used to,” Tyler told The Guardian in 2023. “He
gave me a cassette to listen to in my hotel and we both preferred
take two.”
Featuring E Street Band members Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg
on drums, “Total Eclipse” is a rumination on lost love: “Once upon a
time there was light in my life/But now there’s only love in the
dark,” she sings.
The video, a staple of early-days MTV, was shot in a frightening
gothic former asylum in Surrey, where the guard dogs apparently
wouldn’t set foot in the rooms downstairs where they used to give
people electric shock treatment. The visuals included slow-motion
tossed doves, candles, dancing ninjas, dancing greasers, Tyler in
frighteningly big shoulder pads, fencers, gymnasts, wind machines
and shirtless boys wearing swim goggles being doused with water.
“Faster Than the Speed of Night” earned a Grammy nomination for best
rock vocal performance — losing to Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a
Battlefield” — and Tyler got another nod for “Total Eclipse of the
Heart” in the best pop vocal performance category, losing to Irene
Cara’s “Flashdance — What a Feeling.”
After the ‘Eclipse’
Tyler never reached such dizzying heights again but stayed current
with such movie soundtrack singles as “Holding Out For a Hero” —
from 1984’s “Footloose” — and “Here She Comes” from “Metropolis”
also in 1984.
Her 2019 disc “Between the Earth and the Stars” featured duets with
Rod Stewart, Cliff Richard and Status Quo’s Francis Rossi, and she
ended that year performing a Vatican Christmas concert before Pope
Francis.
In 2013, she switched gears to make a country-flavored record in
Nashville, “Rocks and Honey,” which included the Vince Gill duet
“What You Need From Me” and a little ballad called “Believe in Me,”
written by American songwriter Desmond Child and British songwriters
Lauren Christy and Christopher Braide. “Believe in Me” was picked to
represent the United Kingdom at that year’s Eurovision Song Contest
in Sweden.
“It was an absolutely wonderful atmosphere there,” she told the San
Francisco Examiner in 2023. “I was being interviewed every 15, 20
minutes, and when I walked out onstage behind the British flag, I
thought the roof was going to come off! It was awesome, just
awesome!”
In 2017, she joined Joe Jonas’ band DNCE for a performance on the
cruise ship Oasis of the Seas as part of a “Total Eclipse Cruise.”
When the moon passed in front of the sun, they played “Total Eclipse
of the Heart.”
Tyler was married to property developer and former Olympic judo
competitor Robert Sullivan.
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