Tina Turner, queen of rock’n’roll, turns 70 next week

Tina
Turner, whose famous legs, short skirts and spike heels have flashed
across the stage nonstop for more than half a century, will turn 70
next week. Turner’s enduring popularity resurged in recent months as
she pranced through her sold-out Tina! 50th Anniversary Tour through
Europe and North America. By tour’s end in May, it had grossed 130
million dollars.

Hanes, which makes ladies’ stockings,
capitalized on her fabulous legs for years, turning her into a
television and magazine icon, even after she switched Capri pants on
stage.

Rolling Stone calls Turner “one of the greatest singers
of all times, ” and she has sold 200 million records and more concert
tickets than any other solo performer in history.

Turner is
taking another pause in her career, but if the past is any clue, she
will rebound onstage again. She’s declared her retirement five times,
only to leap back on stage looking as though time has stood still: No
sign of age or exhaustion, no loss of vitality or erotic charisma.

Nevertheless, Turner insists she loves her peace.

“I
simply like to be at home. I can listen to the music I like, and drink
my favourite wine, ” she told a German talk show in June.

Turner’s
life partner is German record executive Erwin Bach, whom she met at
Heathrow Airport in 1985. After living in Cologne, she moved in 1994
with Bach to Zurich. The couple also has homes in southern France and
California. She once said of Bach: “Wherever he goes, I go.”

Turner
was born on November 26, 1939, as Anna Mae Bullock in Brownsville,
Tennessee. Her father worked on a cotton plantation, her mother had
Indian ancestry. She grew up in a gospel church, but has practiced
Buddhism since the 1970s.

After high school, the young woman
with striking appearance moved to the Blues metropolis of its time, St.
Louis, where she met Ike Turner, the guitarist who was eight years her
senior.

Their first single, Fool in Love, stormed to the top
of the Hit Parade. Her breakthrough as a soloist came with River Deep
Mountain High, written for her by Phil Spector in 1966. When the
married couple made their first warm-up appearance for the Rolling
Stones in 1969, they clinched their hold on white music lovers.

But the Ike and Tina success story hit a stone wall with Ike’s drug addiction, philandering and brutality.

After
she was beaten again, this time severely, by Ike on July 2, 1976, in a
hotel room in Dallas, Texas, she massaged him to sleep – then packed up
the four childrren: her own two sons with Ike and two step childre.

She
fled without a penny in her pocket, but her actions served as an
inspiration for thousands of women who lived with daily terror of
domestic abuse.

During the divorce, Tina renouncedany support
from Ike and all rights to their shared music. When she started her
solo career in 1984 in New York, she was half a million dollars in debt
and lived from social welfare.

That same year, the 45-year-old
won four Grammys for her comeback album Private Dancer, and appeared
with Mel Gibson as Aunt Entity in Mad Max – Beyond Thunderdome.

Other
film roles followed, as did another ten albums, high honours from the
music industry and the certainty that she had left most of her
colleagues behind her in the dust. Only Marlene Dietrich persevered
longer, appearing at age 73 in a long evening gown in her One Woman
Show, where she did little more than talk.