ByREUTERS

JULY 9, 2026 12:29

The gravelly voice that made Bonnie Tyler instantly recognizable came from an unexpected mishap.

After surgery to remove vocal cord nodules in 1977, she was told to rest her voice. Yet a sudden angry shout permanently changed its texture.

Six years later the Welsh singer released her signature hit, "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which highlighted her husky delivery and earned a Grammy nomination.

"Holding Out for a Hero," another sweeping rock ballad, followed soon afterward and helped Tyler establish herself on the British pop landscape. Both tracks later appeared in films, television programs and commercials.

Tyler, whose catalog also featured "It's a Heartache" and "Lost in France," has died, BBC News reported on Thursday. She was 75.

Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins in south Wales in 1951, the fourth of six children to a coal miner and a homemaker.

She grew up in a four-bedroom council house with a large garden in the village of Skewen near Swansea. "I think Mam and Dad had it really hard, bringing up a big family on very little," she told The Guardian in 2012.

Music filled everyday life, whether from a radiogram or her mother singing opera or "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini" while doing chores.

At seven, Tyler attended a musical at the local church. There she discovered Irving Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business," sparking her desire to perform.

"I wouldn't say boo to a goose, and yet there was a part of me that yearned to sing in front of people," she recalled in her memoir, Straight from the Heart.

Tyler breaks through working with Jim Steinman

She began as a teenage backing singer before issuing several albums in the 1970s.

Her commercial breakthrough arrived in the early 1980s after she began collaborating with American songwriter Jim Steinman.

She won Steinman over, already celebrated for composing "Bat out of Hell" for Meat Loaf, by sending him demos of theatrical rock songs suited to her voice.

Of first hearing his composition "Total Eclipse," she recalled: "I knew this was the song I had been waiting for all my life." Recorded by Tyler, the piece Steinman called a "Wagnerian-like onslaught of sound and emotion" topped charts in both the UK and US.

Featuring the powerful lines "Once upon a time, I was falling in love, But now I'm only falling apart," the song has surpassed one billion streams on Spotify.

It has appeared in the films Old School and Bandits, the series Glee and Grey's Anatomy, and a Mastercard advertisement.

From the 1990s onward she enjoyed greater success in Norway, Austria and France than at home, although she represented Britain at the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest and was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to music in 2022.

Tyler arrives at her stage name

Tyler married property developer Robert Sullivan, her first serious boyfriend, in 1973. "I am still very much in love with him and he with me," she said 40 years later. The couple had no children.

Tyler never liked her birth name. Explaining how she chose her stage name to BBC Radio Wales, she said: "I got a broadsheet newspaper, and I made an effort to write all the first names I came across on one list and all the surnames on another, and I went through them both and came up with Bonnie Tyler.

"And it's been a brilliant name."