Singer Bonnie Tyler has died at a hospital in Portugal, according to a statement on her social media accounts. She was 75.

The Grammy nominee was hospitalized in early May in Faro, Portugal, where she lived, for emergency intestinal surgery. She was later placed in an induced coma for several weeks.

In a statement, her family said Tyler died “unexpectedly” Wednesday night.

The raspy-voiced singer is best known for the 1983 power ballad Total Eclipse of the Heart — a No. 1 hit in Canada, the U.K., and the Billboard Hot 100. She was nominated for a Grammy for both the song, and the album it came from, Faster Than the Speed of Night, in 1984.

The coal miner’s daughter from Wales first had a No. 1 hit in Canada in 1978 with It’s A Heartache, which was a top five Billboard hit.

“Wales has lost a true icon, whose music brought joy to so many,” Welsh First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth said in a statement. “I extend my heartfelt condolences to her family, friends and fans across the world.”

Tyler maintained her career up until the time of her death, with scheduled concerts cancelled after her May surgery.

Singers Bryan Adams, Howard Jones and Cliff Richard, and actress Catherine Zeta-Jones — a cousin of Tyler’s longtime husband Robert Sullivan — were among the entertainers posting tributes on social media.

“An extraordinary woman with vocals to match,” said Zeta-Jones, who called Tyler a one-of-a-kind artist “who so easily could have been a comedian because she was one of the funniest people I ever met.”

Smash with a long-lasting life

Total Eclipse of the Heart spent four weeks at No. 1, the video has surpassed one billion views on Spotify and the music outlet Stereogum in 2020 declared it an “extinction-level event rendered in musical form.”

The song has never really gone away, covered by the English singer Nicki French in 1995 and the group Westlife in 2006, while One Direction sang it in 2010 on the U.K. version of The X Factor. It has also been used in movies like Bandits and Old School.

The song was also boosted during real eclipses in 2017 and 2024. In 2017, she joined Joe Jonas’s band DNCE for a performance on the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas as part of a “Total Eclipse Cruise.” When the moon passed in front of the sun, they played the song.

The song was written by producer Jim Steinman, whose cachet in the music industry shot up with the smash Bat Out of Hell album for Meat Loaf in 1978.

“It was my dream to work with him, and I got it,” Tyler told CBC News in 2024 of working with Steinman, who died in 2021.

Steinman repurposed one of the song’s lyrics — “Turn around, bright eyes” — from a 1969 musical he wrote while a student at Massachusetts’ Amherst College.

“Jim liked to put down a basic rhythm track, do nine takes of the song, choose the best one and then put the kitchen sink on there, like Phil Spector used to,” Tyler told the Guardian in 2023.

The video for the rumination of lost love was shot in a frightening gothic former asylum in Surrey The visuals included slow-motion tossed doves, candles, dancing ninjas, dancing greasers, Tyler in frighteningly big shoulder pads, fencers, gymnasts, wind machines and shirtless boys wearing swim goggles being doused with water.

“It was freezing cold and I had to run barefoot through the snow,” she told CBC Radio. “It was very hard for one to do. But it was incredible. I had total faith in Jim’s storyboards.”

Tyler and Steinman would collaborate again for the faster-paced Holding Out For a Hero, a top 40 Billboard hit from 1984’s Footloose.

Early success

Tyler was born as Gaynor Hopkins in Skewen, Wales, about seven miles outside Swansea. She grew up with three sisters and two brothers.

She adored the Beatles and watched Top of the Pops religiously, she later wrote in a memoir, Straight From the Heart. She would record the show on a reel-to-reel two-track recorder and write down the lyrics of songs she loved, including favourites from Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding.

• Decades later, Bonnie Tyler still finds new fans for her hit song every total eclipse

“I used to sing them into my hairbrush for hours and hours, and that’s how it all started for me. I fell in love with singing just from doing that,” she wrote. “Looking back, even then my voice had a husky tone to it, but I didn’t think much of it. I thought everyone’s voices were different from each other’s.”

In 1976 she had to have surgery to remove nodules on her throat, leaving her with that trademark vocal sound. Changing her name to Sherene Davis, she was fronting a soul band when she was discovered by talent scout Roger Bell, who brought her to London for demo sessions. Then she waited for a label until RCA said it was interested.

Under her new RCA-sanctioned name Bonnie Tyler, her debut album The World Starts Tonight in 1977 contained her first chart hit, Lost in France, and she was nominated for a breakthrough artists award at the Brits Awards.

The following year’s hit, It’s A Heartache, drew comparisons to Rod Stewart, who said on Thursday in tribute that he sings that song now “every night on tour.”

“We shared similar styles of vocalizing. She was a good pal, a true soul stirrer,” he said on social media.

Asked how she arrived at her performing pseudonym, Tyler once told BBC Radio Wales: “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.”

Tyler got another Grammy nomination in 1985 for Here She Comes from the previous year’s soundtrack to the movie Metropolis. The song was produced by disco hitmaker Giorgio Moroder.

Tyler maintained her career up until the time of her death, with scheduled concerts cancelled after her May surgery.

In 2013, she made a country-flavoured record in Nashville. Rocks and Honey included the Vince Gill duet What You Need From Me.

That album’s Believe in Me, written by American hitmaker Desmond Child and British songwriters Lauren Christy and Christopher Braide, was picked to represent the United Kingdom at that year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden.

“It was an absolutely wonderful atmosphere there,” she told the San Francisco Examiner in 2023. “I was being interviewed every 15, 20 minutes, and when I walked out onstage behind the British flag, I thought the roof was going to come off! It was awesome, just awesome!”

Her 2019 disc Between the Earth and the Stars featured duets with Stewart and Cliff Richard, and she ended that year performing a Vatican Christmas concert before Pope Francis.

Tyler and Sullivan, later a property developer, married in 1973, a year after he competed at the Munich Olympics in judo.