LONDON — Legendary pop singer Bonnie Tyler, best known for hits including “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” has died after weeks in a hospital, her family said Thursday.
She was 75.
“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,” a statement said on her official social media accounts.
The raspy-voiced Welsh singer gained global popularity in the 1970s and 1980s for her power ballads including “Holding Out for a Hero” and “It’s a Heartache.”
In June, Tyler emerged from a monthlong medically induced coma after undergoing emergency surgery to treat a perforated intestine, her family said at the time. She remained “very unwell” and in intensive care, the family said.
Tyler’s shows scheduled through August were canceled or postponed as a result.
“Bonnie was unique, she was a one-off, great sense of humor, a stunning voice and great stage presence,” her representative and music executive Judd Lander said in a statement Thursday. “The world has lost one hell of a great talent!”
A spokesman for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “saddened” to hear about her death, labeling her “one of Britain’s greatest recording artists.”
“An iconic figure, she leaves behind a catalogue of music ... which continues to touch lives, flood dance floors and fill karaoke booths,” a Downing Street spokesman said.
The secretary of state for Wales, Jo Stevens, called her a “Welsh music icon” on X and said she was sad to hear of her death.
The daughter of a Welsh coal miner, Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins and raised in public housing with an outside toilet in Skewen, Wales, about 7 miles outside the city of Swansea.
One of six children, Tyler grew up idolizing Tina Turner and Janis Joplin and singing hymns in the Anglican church her parents attended.
“I class myself as a working-class girl and I’ve never stopped working,” Tyler told The Guardian in 2013.
Dubbed “the female Rod Stewart” because of her distinctive gritty voice, Tyler got her start singing pop song covers in nightclubs while working at a grocery store by day.
The future superstar got her first break when a talent scout heard her belt out Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold.” She eventually signed in 1975 with RCA Records and took the stage name Bonnie Tyler.
Two years later, Tyler underwent vocal nodule surgery that gave her already husky voice the raspy roar that became her calling card.
Her career took off in the 1980s when she teamed up with producer Jim Steinman, who wrote her biggest hits, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “Holding Out for a Hero.”
“Total Eclipse of the Heart” came out in 1983 and made it to No. 1 on both the U.S. and U.K. charts. The bombastic ballad then became a karaoke anthem. It has had more than 1 billion streams, boosted by real eclipses in 2017 and 2024.
“I never get tired of singing it,” she once told BBC News. “I love it because everyone can’t wait to sing it.”
Tyler earned three Grammy nods, represented Britain at the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 and was awarded a medal of honor for her services to music by Queen Elizabeth II in 2023.
In recent years, Tyler lived with her husband, Robert Sullivan, in Faro, a city in southern Portugal. The couple, who married in 1973, had no children.
“We just thought it wasn’t meant to be,” Tyler said after she suffered a miscarriage when she was 39.
Actor Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is related to Sullivan and also a daughter of Wales, said on Instagram that “my heart is broken with the news that our dearest Bonnie Tyler has passed away.”
No funeral arrangements have been announced for Tyler.
“We will issue a further statement shortly but for now ask for privacy to deal with this tragedy,” her family said on Tyler’s official Facebook page.
