Tina Turner, one of the most famous pop and soul singers of all time, who with her great voice and magnetic stage presence sold millions of records and played packed concerts for years, has died at 83. Famous for songs like “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, “River Deep – Mountain High” and “Proud Mary”, she had her first big success in the 60s and 70s as a duo with singer and guitarist Ike Turner, also her husband from which he took his surname, and then as a soloist in the eighties. Turner’s death was announced by her spokesman Bernard Doherty, but her cause is not known: Turner had suffered several serious health problems in recent years, including cancer and a stroke. She was staying at her home in Küsnacht, near Zurich, Switzerland, a country of which she was a citizen.
Becoming famous as a rock’n’roll singer, beginning in the late 1950s when she was still in high school in St. Louis, Missouri, within a few years she also made herself known outside the United States, and in particular in the United Kingdom Kingdom where she opened for the Rolling Stones with her and her husband’s band, the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. They distinguished themselves with very energetic and spectacular concerts, slipping one hit after another until a cover of “Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival which remains their most famous song to this day.
After twenty years together with her husband, who was later found to be behaving violently, Turner began a solo career which, however, took a few years to get going. In 1979, however, she worked regularly for the program Luna Park of Rai 1 together with Pippo Baudo and Heather Parisi. It seemed that her role was now that of the former famous singer who performed in nostalgic contexts, when in 1984 she released Private Dancer, which topped the charts and sold 12 million copies. It contained “What’s Love Got to Do with It”, which remained her most famous single.
He wisely adapted to the context of show business in the 1980s, reinventing his own character and musical style. His most formidable and profitable talent was that of him as a performer, and his concerts in which he exhibited his enormous musical talents and his great stage skills had extraordinary and lasting successes above all in the United States. She retired in 2000, and then returned with one last tour in 2008. She Then she no longer sang: «I was tired of singing and making everyone happy. It was all I had ever done in my life,” she told al New York Times in 2019. She had been married since 2013 to the German record producer Erwin Bach, and had renounced her American citizenship to take that of Switzerland, where she lived.