Tina Turner, the pioneering rocknroll star who became a pop behemoth in the 1980s, has died aged 83 after a long illness. She had suffered ill health in recent years, being diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2016 and having a kidney transplant in 2017. Tina Turner affirmed and amplified Black womens formative stake in rocknroll, defining that era of music to the extent that Mick Jagger admitted to taking inspiration from her high-kicking, energetic live performances for his stage persona. After two decades of working with her abusive husband, Ike Turner, she struck out alone and after a few false starts became one of the defining pop icons of the 1980s with the album Private Dancer.

Her life was chronicled in three memoirs, a biopic, a jukebox musical, and in 2021, the acclaimed documentary film, Tina. In a statement on Wednesday night, her publicist Bernard Doherty said: Tina Turner, the Queen of Rockn Roll has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Kusnacht near Zurich, Switzerland. With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model. In 2018, scholar Daphne A Brooks wrote for the Guardian: Turners musical character has always been a charged combination of mystery as well as light, melancholy mixed with a ferocious vitality that often flirted with danger.

Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on 26 November 1939 and raised in Nutbush, Tennessee, where she recalled picking cotton with her family as a child. She sang in the tiny towns church choir, and as a teenager talked or rather, sang her way into Ikes band in St Louis: he had declined her request to join until he heard her seize the microphone during a Kings of Rhythm performance for a rendition of BB Kings You Know I Love You. After her vocal talents became apparent, Ike gave her the name Tina Turner and trademarked it in case she left him and he wanted to replace her in his act. He quickly became abusive: when Turner tried to leave the group early on after having got a sense of his mercurial character, he hit her with a wooden shoe stretcher.

My relationship with Ike was doomed the day he figured out I was going to be his moneymaker, Turner wrote in her 2018 biography My Love Story. He needed to control me, economically and psychologically, so I could never leave him. She made her recorded debut under the name with the Ike and Tina Turner single A Fool in Love in July 1960, which broke the US Top 30 and started a run of respectable chart success. But it was their live performances that made them a sensation. Ike toured the Ike and Tina Turner Revue aggressively on the Chitlin Circuit including in front of desegregated audiences, such was their commercial power. In 1964, they signed to Warner Bros imprint Loma Records, which released their first album to chart: Live! The Ike Tina Turner Show. In the second half of the 60s, the duo were courted by many of rocks biggest names. Phil Spector produced the 1966 single River Deep Mountain High; they supported the Rolling Stones in the UK and later the US, and stars including David Bowie, Sly Stone, Cher, Elvis Presley and Elton John came to their Las Vegas residency.

In 2020, a remix of her 1984 hit Whats Love Got to Do With It? by the Norwegian producer Kygo made Turner the first artist to have a UK Top 40 hit in seven consecutive decades. In 2021, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, 30 years after Ike and Tina Turners induction. Turner is survived by her second husband, German music executive Erwin Bach. They married in July 2013 after 27 years together and lived in Switzerland. In 2013, Turner renounced her US citizenship to become a Swiss citizen. Her first child, Craig Raymond Turner, died in July 2018. Last year, Turner said that following her other son Ronnies death at the age of 62 that he left the world far too early. She is survived by two of Ike Turners sons, Ike Turner Jr and Michael Turner, whom she adopted. In 2020, Turner told the Guardian that despite having some serious health problems, the last 10 years of her life had embodied her ideal vision of happiness. True and lasting happiness comes from having an unshakeable, hopeful spirit that can shine, no matter what, she said. Thats what Ive achieved, and it is my greatest wish to help others become truly happy as well.