Facts about Tina Turner
Tina Turner Biography
First famous as a rock-and-roll ingenue in her husband’s band, Tina Turner remade herself in the 1980s as a Grammy-winning solo star, actress and author.
Tina Turner was only 18 when she began singing with frenetic rhythm and blues star Ike Turner in the late 1950s, when she was known as “Little Ann” Bullock. The two married in 1962, and with a new stage name of Tina Turner she got nearly equal billing in the band, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Their hot stage act was a hit on repeated tours of the U.K. and the U.S. and they released several records; their biggest hit, “Proud Mary,” came out in 1970.
Tina Turner left Ike in 1976, amid acrimonious tales of drugs and abuse, and went solo. (She recounted many of those stories in a 1986 autobiography, I, Tina.) In 1984 she released the album Private Dancer. It included a number one single (“What’s Love Got to Do With It?”) and won Grammy Awards for record of the year, female pop performance and female rock vocal of the year.
Tina Turner settled into her new persona as a proud survivor and grande dame of R&B, and continued to record and tour her high-energy act into the 21st century, including a worldwide “50th Anniversary Tour” in 2008. She also tried her hand at acting, most notably as the Acid Queen in The Who‘s rock opera Tommy (1975) and as the domineering Aunty Entity in the apocalyptic Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985, with Mel Gibson).
She married her longtime boyfriend, German music executive Erwin Bach, in 2013. She released a second memoir, Tina Turner: My Love Story, in 2018. At her death in 2023, The New York Times noted that “She had a stroke in recent years and was known to be struggling with a kidney disease and other illnesses.”
Extra credit
In her autobiography, Tina Turner says that Ike gave her the stage name of Tina Turner before the release of their first hit single together, “A Fool In Love,” in 1960… Ike and Tina Turner were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. The Hall calls them “one of the highest energy ensembles on the soul circuit in the late ’60s and early ’70s”… Tina Turner was also inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame as a solo act in 2021… Ike Turner died in 2007… “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” Tina Turner’s 1985 theme for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, was also a popular hit… She was played by Angela Bassett in the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It; Laurence Fishburne played Ike… Her last studio album was Twenty Four Seven (1999).