How Tina Turner overcame life of tragedy
From a traumatic childhood to her abusive marriage and shock deaths, Tina Turner’s life was one of huge highs and rock-bottom lows.
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She was one of the world’s biggest stars, who lit up the stage with her electrifying charisma and powerhouse voice.
But behind the glitz and glamour, Tina Turner, who has died at the age of 83, suffered personal tragedies that would have brought down a lesser being.
In an exclusive interview with News Corp in 2021 to mark her candid documentary Tina, the songstress told how in later years she had been reflecting on her incredible life from different angles.
“I think my farewell started already in 2009 when I retired from performing,” Turner told News Corp exclusively.
“The documentary gives me a chance to complete the telling of my story – it’s out there now for everyone to see and I hope it answers all the questions.
“But my fans and I will always have a special relationship that lives on in the music and memories. The feelings we share aren’t going away.”
Hers was a life of extreme highs and lows — the high being her miraculous comeback and rise to superstardom after her divorce from Ike Turner, which left a penniless Tina with just 36 cents to her name.
Her disastrous 16-year marriage to the monstrous Ike at the age of just 22 is well-documented.
Their union was one controlled by the physically and emotionally abusive Ike, an insecure narcissist who claimed to have been the architect of rock n’ roll.
Already a single mother to toddler son Craig by the time she married Ike, the couple went on to have a son together, Ronnie, and Tina also adopted Ike’s two sons Ike jnr and Michael from his previous relationship.
As they toured together as the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, Tina endured horrific beatings, broken bones and even third-degree burns when Ike once threw hot coffee in her face.
At one point, she was close to suicide. “At my lowest, I convinced myself that death was my only way out. I actually tried to kill myself,” she wrote.
“But I came out of the darkness believing I was meant to survive.”
Tina, who sought solace in Buddhism, opened up about Ike in her 2021 documentary.
“For a long time I did hate Ike,” she said. “After he died I realised he was a sick person, an ill person at the soul. He did get me started, he was good to me in the beginning, so I do have some good thoughts …”
Tina eventually left Ike after enduring a horrific beating in the back of a car and following their 1978 divorce she never saw him again.
But the superstar had already faced unimaginable hardships even before she met the drug-addicted Ike, who died from a cocaine overdose in 2007.
Born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, in Brownsville, Tennessee, she endured a heartbreaking childhood.
Tina told Rolling Stone in a 1986 interview that her mother “didn’t want her” because she was “in the process of leaving her father” when she got pregnant.
The star was later abandoned and left with her strict paternal grandparents.
“My parents weren’t mine, and I wasn’t theirs, really, so when they left, it was as if they had always been gone as far as I was concerned.” she told Rolling Stone.
After working in rural cotton fields, Tina pursued a career in music at the age of 16 but her mother was jealous, the star later told good friend Oprah Winfrey.
“She never believed in me. She never wanted this child and when this child grew up to be successful and creative, she didn’t accept it because it was something she didn’t want,” she told Winfrey.
At the age of 19 Tina gave birth to her first son, Craig, after a brief relationship with saxophonist Raymond Hill, who abandoned Tina before she gave birth.
In 2019, Tina opened up about Craig’s tragic death from suicide at the age of 59 the year before.
“I think Craig was lonely, that’s what I think really got him more than anything else,” she told CBS News‘ Gayle King.
“I have pictures all around of him smiling, and I think I’m sensing that he’s in a good place. I really do.”
In December 2022, tragedy struck again when her second son Ronnie, who had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, died at the age of 62.
Turner took to social media to pay tribute to her son in a heartbreaking post.
“Ronnie, you left the world far too early,” the star said.
“In sorrow, I close my eyes and think of you, my beloved son.”
Tina had endured her own health battles, suffering a stroke in 2013 three months after her second marriage to her longtime partner Erwin Bach.
“I woke up suddenly and in a panic,” the iconic singer wrote.
“A lightning bolt struck my head and my right leg — at least that’s how it felt — and I had a funny sensation in my mouth that made it difficult for me to call out to Erwin for help. I suspected it wasn’t good, but it was worse than I ever imagined. I was having a stroke.”
She was also open about her struggles wtih kidney failure and high blood pressure in later years.
Originally published as How Tina Turner overcame life of tragedy
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