ΤΙΝΑ TURNER

After the recent death of the queen of rock’n’roll, Cameron Adams charts the soaring highs and devastating lows that punctuated her life as a musician and icon

Tina Turner has left the stage for the last time. She died peacefully at her home in Zurich, aged 83, on May 24.

Her final appearance had been taking part in the sanctioned but candid Tina documentary film in 2021, which came after a rare public sighting when she spoke on Broadway in New York in November 2019, after the opening of Tina – the musical based on her life and music.

Now playing in Sydney, the production that replicates her life and music has garnered huge acclaim – perhaps unsurprisingly given its incredible source material. Tina was, quite simply, one of the most captivating and groundbreaking rock performers of all time.

Before becoming a Broadway musical, her life story had already been the subject of two autobiographies and a hit Hollywood biopic.

Born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, in Tennessee, her path to becoming Tina Turner is as much a tale of incredible survival as it is of unique talent. Tina’s childhood was less than ideal. She wrote in her first autobiography that her mother, who abandoned Tina when she was 11 when escaping an abusive marriage, had never shown her love. By 13, Tina and her two older sisters were being raised by their grandparents. Later, after becoming famous, Tina bought her mother a house. “I was trying to make her comfortable because she didn’t have a husband, she was alone,” the star said in the 2021 documentary. “But she still didn’t like me.”

Tina met fellow musician Ike Turner at age 17, and it didn’t take long for her to join his St Louis band the Kings of Rhythm. Tina (then still Anna Mae) first dated the group’s saxophonist Raymond Hill, who became the father of her first child, Craig, in 1958.