Tina Turner

• 1. Introduction

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  Tina Turner crossed a Texas freeway on foot on the 1st of July 1976 with 36 cents and a Mobil credit card in her pocket. She had slipped out of a hotel suite in Dallas after a fight, while her husband slept. Her destination was a nearby Ramada Inn. Behind her lay a music career that had already made her famous. Ahead lay the task of walking away from nearly everything that career had built. She was born Anna Mae Bullock, the daughter of an overseer of sharecroppers in rural Tennessee. Decades later she would be crowned the Queen of Rock 'n' Roll. How did a girl from a family that picked cotton reach that title? Who invented the name Tina Turner, and why did he trademark it? What happens to a performer when the act she built belongs to the man she is fleeing? And how did she rebuild a career that many had written off as nostalgia?

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• 2. Nutbush Roots

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  Poindexter Farm stood along Highway 180 near Nutbush, Tennessee, a rural unincorporated community where Floyd Richard Bullock worked as an overseer of the sharecroppers. His daughter Anna Mae was born on the 26th of November 1939 in nearby Brownsville. She later remembered picking cotton beside her family at a very young age. Her parents, Floyd and Zelma Priscilla, were African American. For years she believed she had a large share of Native American ancestry. That changed when she took part in the PBS series African American Lives 2. Host Henry Louis Gates Jr. shared her genealogical DNA estimates and traced her family timeline.

  World War II scattered the household. Her parents moved to Knoxville to work at a defense facility, and the three Bullock sisters were separated. Anna Mae went to stay with her strict, religious paternal grandparents, Alex and Roxanna Bullock. They served as deacon and deaconess at Woodlawn Missionary Baptist Church. After the war the sisters rejoined their parents in Knoxville. Two years later the family went back to Nutbush and settled in the Flagg Grove community. Anna Mae attended Flagg Grove School from first through eighth grade. She loved singing and acting, and she performed in the streets for spare change so she could go to the movies. She also sang in the choir at Spring Hill Baptist Church.

  The year 1950 broke the family apart. When Anna Mae was 11, her mother left without warning, escaping an abusive relationship with Floyd by moving to St. Louis. Two years later her father married another woman and moved to Detroit. The sisters went to live with their maternal grandmother, Georgeanna Currie, in Brownsville. In her autobiography I, Tina, Turner wrote that she felt her parents did not love her and that she was unwanted. Zelma had planned to leave Floyd but stayed once she became pregnant with Anna Mae. Turner recalled, "She was a very young woman who didn't want another kid."

  As a teenager she worked as a domestic for the Henderson family in Ripley, Tennessee. She was at the Henderson house when word came that her half-sister Evelyn had died in a car crash with their cousin Margaret Currie. Another cousin, Vela Evans, survived with injuries. At Carver High School in Brownsville, the self-professed tomboy joined both the cheerleading squad and the girls' basketball team. She "socialized every chance she got."

  Her grandmother died in 1956, and Anna Mae moved to St. Louis to live with her mother. She graduated from Sumner High School in 1958 and then worked as a nurse's aide at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Her older sister Alline, meanwhile, was making a habit of going out to hear a band in St. Louis and East St. Louis.

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• 3. The Revue

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  One Saturday night at the Club Manhattan in East St. Louis, Anna Mae's mother let her tag along with Alline to see Ike Turner and his band, the Kings of Rhythm. Watching Ike play, she later said, she "almost went into a trance." By the age of 17 she was a regular at Club D'Lisa and Club Manhattan. She wanted to sing with the band. Alline's boyfriend, the drummer Eugene "Gene" Washington, passed along the request. Ike agreed but never followed through. She suspected her skinny frame was the reason, since Ike was drawn to curvier women.

  At an intermission one night, she took matters into her own hands. She grabbed a microphone and sang the B.B. King blues ballad "You Know I Love You." Ike was impressed. He let her keep singing that night and soon made her a featured vocalist. He also began coaching her in vocal control and stage performance. In 1958 she made her recording debut as Little Ann on the single "Boxtop," alongside Ike and vocalist Carlson Oliver.

  In 1960 Ike wrote "A Fool in Love" for a singer named Art Lassiter. Bullock was supposed to sing backing vocals with Lassiter's group, the Artettes. Lassiter never showed up at Technisonic Studios. Ike had already paid for the studio time, so Bullock suggested she sing the lead. The plan was to record her as a demo and erase her vocals later. St. Louis disc jockey Dave Dixon then convinced Ike to send the tape to Juggy Murray, president of the R&B label Sue Records. Murray said, "Tina sounded like screaming dirt. It was a funky sound." He bought the track and paid Ike a $25,000 advance for the recording and publishing rights.

  Murray also urged Ike to make Bullock "the star of the show." Ike renamed her Tina because it rhymed with Sheena. He had drawn her stage persona from Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Nyoka the Jungle Girl. He added his own last name and trademarked "Tina Turner." His reasoning was simple. If she left, as his earlier singers had, he could replace her with another Tina Turner. Family and friends still called her Ann.

  The public met Tina Turner in July 1960 with "A Fool in Love." It reached number 2 on the Hot R&B Sides chart and number 27 on the Billboard Hot 100. Journalist Kurt Loder gave the song a memorable verdict. He called it "the blackest record to ever creep into the white pop charts since Ray Charles's gospel-styled 'What'd I Say' that previous summer." In 1961 "It's Gonna Work Out Fine" reached number 14 on the Hot 100 and number 2 on the R&B chart. It earned the duo a Grammy nomination for Best Rock and Roll Performance.

  The Ike & Tina Turner Revue took shape after that first hit. Tina was the lead vocalist, the Ikettes sang backup and danced, and Ike stayed in the background as bandleader of the Kings of Rhythm. He drove the whole company through a punishing schedule that once included 90 days of performances in a row. On the Chitlin' Circuit, the revue earned a reputation as "one of the hottest, most durable, and potentially most explosive of all R&B ensembles." Its spectacle rivaled the James Brown Revue. Because the shows were so profitable, the group could play for desegregated audiences in Southern clubs and hotels.

  In 1964 the duo signed with Warner Bros. Records, and Bob Krasnow became their manager. Their album Live! The Ike & Tina Turner Show peaked at number 8 on the Billboard Hot R&B LP chart in February 1965. Tina's solo spots on American Bandstand and Shindig! raised her profile, while the whole revue appeared on Hollywood a Go-Go. In 1965 the producer Phil Spector watched the act at a club on the Sunset Strip and invited them into the concert film The Big T.N.T. Show.

  Spector left that film determined to produce Tina. He made a deal with Krasnow, who was both her manager and head of Loma. Spector offered $20,000 for creative control of the sessions and for the duo's release from their recording contract. They signed to his Philles label in April 1966, after Tina had already recorded with him. Their first single, "River Deep - Mountain High," came out in May 1966. Spector considered it his best work, with Turner's maximum energy set against his Wall of Sound. In the UK it reached number 3, and it hit number 1 on Los 40 Principales in Spain. In the United States it climbed no higher than number 88 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its overseas impact won the duo an opening slot on the Rolling Stones UK tour in the fall of 1966. In November 1967 Tina became the first woman and the first black artist on the cover of Rolling Stone.

  The duo moved to Blue Thumb Records in 1968 and released Outta Season in 1969. It produced a charting cover of Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long." Their album The Hunter followed, and its title track, Albert King's "The Hunter," earned Tina a Grammy nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. The revue began headlining in Las Vegas. Sly Stone, Janis Joplin, Cher, James Brown, Ray Charles, Elton John and Elvis Presley all came to the shows. Sammy Davis Jr. adored her. After she filmed an episode of The Name of the Game with him in Las Vegas, he surprised her with a Jaguar XJ6. Her wardrobe moved from formal dresses to minidresses and revealing outfits, and she emerged as a sex symbol praised for her sensual performances.

  In the fall of 1969 the duo opened for the Rolling Stones on their US tour. Appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, Playboy After Dark and The Andy Williams Show followed. Their 1970 albums Come Together and Workin' Together marked a turn from their usual R&B repertoire toward rock songs such as "Come Together," "Honky Tonk Woman" and "Get Back." Their cover of "I Want to Take You Higher" peaked at number 34 on the Hot 100. The Sly and the Family Stone original had stalled at number 38. In early 1971 their version of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Proud Mary" became their biggest hit. It reached number 4, sold more than a million copies, and won a Grammy for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group. That July they released What You Hear Is What You Get, recorded at Carnegie Hall, which became their first certified Gold album.

  In 1972 the Turners opened Bolic Sound, a recording studio near their home in Inglewood. Tina began writing more songs and penned nine of the ten tracks on the album Feel Good. In October 1972 she and the Ikettes played Star-Spangled Women, a fundraiser for George McGovern's presidential campaign at Madison Square Garden. The next year her own composition "Nutbush City Limits" reached number 22 on the pop chart and number 11 on the R&B chart. It went to number 1 in Austria and number 4 in the UK. Selling more than a million copies in Europe earned the duo the Golden European Record Award, the first ever given.

  Her first solo album, Tina Turns the Country On!, arrived in September 1974 and earned a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female. That same year she filmed the rock opera Tommy, playing the Acid Queen, a drug-addicted prostitute, to critical acclaim. Working alone in London gave her a sense of independence. In 1975 she told People, "I've always been in there helping him and now, in Tommy, I've learned I can do things without him. Ike'll be proud, but he's gonna miss me." The solo album Acid Queen followed, reaching number 39 on the Billboard R&B chart.

  By 1976 the Turners were headlining the Waldorf Astoria in New York and had signed a television deal with CBS. Ike also planned to move them from United Artists Records to Cream Records on a five-year deal worth $150,000 per year. The signing was set for the 5th of July.

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• 4. The Marriage

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  Harry Taylor was Turner's first love, a popular boy she met at a high school basketball game in Brownsville. In 1986 she told Rolling Stone that he had tons of girlfriends until she finally won him, and they went steady for a year. It ended when she learned he had married another girl who was expecting his child.

  In St. Louis she dated Raymond Hill, the saxophonist of the Kings of Rhythm. Midway through her senior year of high school she learned she was pregnant. She moved into Ike Turner's home, where Hill and other band members lived. She recalled thinking, "My baby's going to be beautiful." Hill then broke his ankle in a wrestling match with the vocalist Carlson Oliver, left the band, and returned to his hometown of Clarksdale. Their son Craig was born in August 1958, and she raised him alone.

  With Ike, she described the early bond as that of a "brother and sister from another lifetime." They were platonic friends until one night in January 1960, after Ike broke up with his girlfriend Lorraine Taylor. Turner had gone to sleep in his bed because another musician threatened to enter her room. She became pregnant, and Ike soon reconciled with Taylor. After recording "A Fool in Love," she told Ike she did not want to continue the relationship. She said he answered by striking her in the head with a wooden shoe stretcher. It was the first time he made her afraid. She stayed because she "really did care about him."

  Their son Ronnie was born in October 1960. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1962, and Tina and Ike married in Tijuana. In 1963 Ike bought a house in the View Park area. Soon afterward the boys joined them from St. Louis: Ronnie, Craig, and Ike's two sons with Taylor, Ike Jr. and Michael.

  Ike's violence and infidelity drove Turner to attempt suicide in 1968 by overdosing on Valium. She later said, "It was my relationship with Ike that made me most unhappy. At first, I had really been in love with him. Look what he'd done for me. But he was totally unpredictable." She wrote of hot coffee thrown in her face that left third-degree burns. She wrote of blows to her nose so frequent that she tasted blood as she sang. She wrote of a broken jaw and of forgetting what life was like without a black eye.

  She filed for divorce on the 27th of July 1976, citing irreconcilable differences. The decree came on the 29th of March 1978. In it she took responsibility for missed concert dates and an IRS lien. She kept the royalties for songs she had written, while Ike received the publishing royalties for his compositions and hers. She also kept two Jaguars, her furs, her jewelry and her stage name. She handed Ike her share of Bolic Sound, the publishing companies and the real estate, and he kept his four cars.

  In a 1981 interview with People, she spoke publicly for the first time about the abuse. Ike could be "very loving," she said, but "I was living a life of death, I didn't exist. I didn't fear him killing me when I left, because I was already dead. When I walked out, I didn't look back." In his autobiography Takin' Back My Name, Ike offered his own account: "Sure, I've slapped Tina. We had fights and there have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her." In 1999 Roseanne Barr urged him on The Roseanne Show to apologize publicly. In 2007 he told Jet that he still loved Turner. He said he had written a letter apologizing for "putting her and the kids through that kind of stuff," but he never sent it.

  Ike died on the 12th of December 2007. Turner's spokesperson issued a short statement: "Tina hasn't had any contact with Ike in more than 30 years. No further comment will be made." Her sister Alline, who still thought of Ike as a brother-in-law, attended his funeral. In 2018 Turner told The Sunday Times, "as an old person, I have forgiven him, but I would not work with him. He asked for one more tour with me, and I said, 'No, absolutely not.' Ike wasn't someone you could forgive and allow him back in."

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• 5. Starting Over

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  In 1977 Turner returned to the stage in new costumes designed by Bob Mackie, fronting a band she had assembled herself. Lawsuits over canceled Ike & Tina Turner dates had been piling up since the separation. To earn money she appeared on television shows including Hollywood Squares, Donny & Marie, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and The Brady Bunch Hour. Mike Stewart, an executive at United Artists Records, helped fund her return to performing so she could pay off her debts. She took her act to smaller venues and headlined a series of cabaret shows at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Later in 1977 she began her first solo concert tour, in Australia. For almost two years she lived on food stamps while she played small clubs.

  Trouble followed her in the courts. In November 1976 an officer stopped her for a traffic violation and found a .38-caliber revolver in her purse. She was arrested on a misdemeanor charge. Her attorney said she carried the gun because of threats on her life. In 1978 Diners Club Corp. sued her and her company, Tina's Operation Oops, claiming she owed more than $26,000 for credit card purchases.

  In September 1978 she and Tom Jones starred in an HBO special shot at the Warner Theatre in Washington, DC. Around then her third solo album, Rough, came out on United Artists. Its 1979 follow-up, Love Explosion, took a brief detour into disco. Neither album charted, and United Artists and Turner parted ways. With no hit to build on, she kept performing and headlined her second tour.

  The Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco gave her a new ally in 1979. Australian manager Roger Davies saw her perform there and agreed to take her on. Early that year she also worked in Italy as a regular on the Rete 1 series Luna Park, hosted by Pippo Baudo and Heather Parisi. Later in 1979 she made a controversial five-week tour of South Africa during the apartheid regime. She later admitted she had been "naive about the politics in South Africa."

  In October 1981 Rod Stewart came to her show at the Ritz in New York and invited her to sing "Hot Legs" with him on Saturday Night Live. In November she opened three shows for the Rolling Stones on their 1981 American tour. In March 1982 an appearance on the Dutch Willem Ruis show led to the hit "Shame, Shame, Shame," which reached number 47 in the Netherlands. That year she also recorded the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion" with the British production team B.E.F., a side project of the band Heaven 17. It became a hit in European dance clubs. Her video for the song aired on the fledgling channel MTV, making her one of the first black American artists to get airtime there. She also appeared as a special guest on Chuck Berry's television special at The Roxy in West Hollywood.

  Still, until 1983 she was treated as a nostalgia act, playing mostly hotel ballrooms and clubs in the United States. During her second stint at the Ritz, she signed with Capitol Records.

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• 6. Private Dancer Years

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  Martyn Ware of Heaven 17 co-produced Turner's cover of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" in November 1983, with his bandmate Glenn Gregory singing backup. The single reached number 6 in the UK. In the United States it peaked at number 26 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 1 on Hot Dance Club Songs and number 3 on Hot Black Singles. A minor hit with her version of the Beatles' "Help" reached the UK Top 40 in March 1984. Capitol then approved a full studio album.

  Turner had two weeks to record it. Private Dancer came out in May 1984 and reached number 3 on the Billboard 200 and number 2 in the United Kingdom. It was certified 5× Platinum in the United States and sold 10 million copies worldwide, making it her most successful album. Capitol released the single "What's Love Got to Do with It" that same month. The British pop group Bucks Fizz had recorded it earlier. After the album appeared, she toured as the opening act for Lionel Richie.

  On the 1st of September 1984, "What's Love Got to Do with It" gave Turner her first and only number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Both "Better Be Good to Me" and "Private Dancer" became US Top 10 hits. In November she released a duet with David Bowie on Iggy Pop's "Tonight," which peaked at number 53 in both the UK and the US. The Paris designer Karl Lagerfeld sent models down his spring 1985 runway in Tina Turner wigs and said he was "mad for her." At the 27th Annual Grammy Awards she won three trophies, including Record of the Year for "What's Love Got to Do with It."

  Her second world tour began in February 1985. Two nights at the NEC Arena in Birmingham, England, were filmed and released on home video. The designer Azzedine Alaïa dressed her for much of the tour, and she sometimes dedicated songs to him. She also lent her voice to the benefit song "We Are the World" for USA for Africa.

  In Australia she starred opposite Mel Gibson in the post-apocalyptic sequel Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, her first acting role in ten years. She played Aunty Entity, the glamorous ruler of Bartertown. Critics were generally positive about her performance, and the film grossed more than $36 million in the United States. She won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress. Two songs she recorded for the film both succeeded. "We Don't Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)" became a transatlantic Top 3 hit, and "One of the Living" won her the Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. In July 1985 she performed at Live Aid alongside Mick Jagger, who infamously ripped off her skirt to reveal an even shorter miniskirt underneath. Her duet with Bryan Adams, "It's Only Love," earned a Grammy nomination, and its video won an MTV Video Music Award for Best Stage Performance.

  Break Every Rule arrived in 1986 and reached number 1 in four countries. It sold over five million copies worldwide in its first year, including more than a million each in the United States and Germany. Singles included "Typical Male," "Two People," "What You Get Is What You See" and the Grammy-winning "Back Where You Started." Just before its release she published her bestselling autobiography I, Tina. The Break Every Rule World Tour, which began in March 1987, became the highest-grossing tour by a female artist of the 1980s. In January 1988 she played to 180,000 people at Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. It set a Guinness World Record at the time for the largest paying attendance for a solo artist. Tina Live in Europe, released in April 1988, won a Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.

  Foreign Affair, released in 1989, reached number 1 in eight countries. In the UK it earned 5× Platinum status and became her first number-one album there. It sold over six million copies worldwide and included the international hit "The Best." Her 1990 Foreign Affair European Tour drew nearly four million spectators, beating the European touring record set by the Rolling Stones. In October 1991 the compilation Simply the Best sold seven million copies worldwide. In the UK it is certified 8× Platinum, with more than two million copies sold.

  The 1993 film What's Love Got to Do with It starred Angela Bassett as Turner and Laurence Fishburne as Ike. Both received Oscar nominations. Turner was not heavily involved in the film, but she re-recorded old songs and added new ones for the soundtrack. The single "I Don't Wanna Fight" was a Top 10 hit in the US and UK, and the album became her second UK number one. In 1995 she released "GoldenEye," written by Bono and the Edge of U2 for the James Bond film of the same name. The album Wildest Dreams and its tour followed in 1996.

  In September 1999, shortly before her 60th birthday, she released the dance-infused "When the Heartache Is Over." It led off her tenth and final solo album, Twenty Four Seven. The Twenty Four Seven Tour became the highest-grossing tour of 2000, taking in over $120 million. Director David Mallet recorded her two concerts at Wembley Stadium for the DVD One Last Time Live in Concert. At a concert in Zurich in July 2000, she announced that she would retire when the tour ended.

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• 7. Encores and Honors

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  All the Best, released in November 2004, debuted at number 2 on the Billboard 200 in 2005. It became her highest-charting album in the United States. It went Platinum in the US within three months and reached Platinum in seven other countries, including the UK. In December 2005 she received the Kennedy Center Honors. President George W. Bush praised her "natural skill, the energy and sensuality" and called her legs "the most famous in show business." Melissa Etheridge performed "River Deep - Mountain High," Queen Latifah sang "What's Love Got to Do with It," Beyoncé took on "Proud Mary," and Al Green sang "Let's Stay Together." Oprah Winfrey told her, "We don't need another hero. We need more heroines like you, Tina. You make me proud to spell my name w-o-m-a-n."

  In February 2006 Turner released "Teach Me Again," a duet with the Italian singer Elisa recorded for the anthology film All the Invisible Children. All the revenue from the single's sales went to children's projects run by the World Food Programme and UNICEF. In February 2008 she returned to the Grammy Awards stage alongside Beyoncé. She also won a Grammy as a featured artist on River: The Joni Letters. That October she began the Tina!: 50th Anniversary Tour, her first tour in nearly ten years. It became one of the bestselling tours in history, and in 2009 she officially retired from performing.

  In April 2010 fans of Rangers Football Club ran an online campaign that sent her 1989 hit "The Best" back to number 9 on the UK singles chart. That made her the first woman in UK chart history with Top 40 hits in six consecutive decades. In April 2013 she appeared on the cover of the German edition of Vogue at the age of 73, the oldest person ever to do so. In December 2016 she announced Tina, a musical about her life, developed with Phyllida Lloyd and Stage Entertainment. It opened at London's Aldwych Theatre in April 2018 with Adrienne Warren in the lead role. Warren repeated the part on Broadway in the fall of 2019.

  The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award came to her in 2018, and her second memoir, My Love Story, appeared that October. In 2020 she came out of retirement to collaborate with the Norwegian producer Kygo on a remix of "What's Love Got to Do with It." It made her the first artist with a UK Top 40 hit in seven consecutive decades. She also published Happiness Becomes You: A Guide to Changing Your Life for Good, written with the American author Taro Gold and the Swiss singer Regula Curti. Amazon's editors named it one of the best nonfiction books of 2020. In 2021 she appeared in the HBO documentary Tina, directed by Dan Lindsay and T. J. Martin. In October 2021 she sold her music rights to BMG Rights Management for an estimated $50 million, while Warner Music kept handling distribution.

  The numbers behind her career run long. She won 12 Grammy Awards in all, eight of them competitive. Four of those were for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, a record she shares with Pat Benatar and with Sheryl Crow. Three of her recordings sit in the Grammy Hall of Fame: "River Deep - Mountain High" from 1999, "Proud Mary" from 2003 and "What's Love Got to Do with It" from 2012. She is the only woman to have won a Grammy in the pop, rock and R&B fields. She has a total of thirty-five UK Top 40 hits and is ranked among the most successful female singles artists in German chart history. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1986 and a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 1991. In September 2025 she was selected for induction into the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame.

  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honored her twice. In 1991 Ike & Tina Turner were inducted together, but Ike was incarcerated, and Tina stayed away. Through her publicist she said she felt "emotionally unequipped to return to the US and respond to the night of celebration in the manner she would want." Phil Spector accepted the award for them. In 2021 Angela Bassett inducted her as a solo artist. Keith Urban and H.E.R. performed "It's Only Love," Mickey Guyton sang "What's Love Got to Do with It," and Christina Aguilera took on "River Deep - Mountain High." Turner accepted by satellite from her home near Zurich.

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• 8. Switzerland, Faith, Farewell

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  Château Algonquin in Küsnacht, on the shore of Lake Zurich, became Turner's home in 1994. She had earlier owned property in Cologne, London and Los Angeles, plus a villa on the French Riviera named Anna Fleur. Her path to Switzerland ran through a meeting in 1986. EMI sent German music executive Erwin Bach to greet her at Düsseldorf Airport, and she said she felt "love at first sight." He was more than sixteen years her junior. They began as friends, started dating later that year, and moved to Switzerland in the mid-1990s.

  In 2013 Turner applied for Swiss citizenship and said she would renounce her American one. She gave her reasons plainly: she no longer had strong ties to the United States and had no plans to live there. In April she sat the mandatory citizenship test, which demanded advanced German and knowledge of Swiss history. She became a Swiss citizen on the 22nd of April 2013 and received a Swiss passport. In July, after 27 years together, she married Bach at their residence on Lake Zurich. On the 24th of October 2013 she signed the paperwork giving up her American citizenship at the US embassy in Bern. In 2022 the Swiss business magazine Bilanz estimated her wealth at 225 million Swiss francs.

  Faith ran alongside the fame. Turner sometimes called herself a "Buddhist-Baptist," nodding to her Baptist upbringing, where her father was a deacon, and her later conversion. In 2016 she told Lion's Roar magazine, "I consider myself a Buddhist." The 15th of February 1979 issue of Jet put her on its cover beside her Buddhist altar. Her 1986 autobiography credited Valerie Bishop, whom Ike hired to work at Bolic Sound in 1973, with introducing her to Nichiren Buddhism. In her 2020 spiritual memoir, she said her son Ronnie first suggested chanting might help her. She practiced with her neighborhood Soka Gakkai International chanting group. In her hardest years she chanted four hours a day. She said the practice taught her, "I realized that I had within me everything I needed to change my life for the better."

  She compared chanting to music. "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is a song," she told Lion's Roar. "It is a sound and a rhythm and it touches a place inside you." The 1993 film What's Love Got to Do with It and the 2021 documentary Tina both dramatized her chanting. On the 2nd of August 2005 she met the 14th Dalai Lama in Einsiedeln, Switzerland. In 2009 she co-founded the Beyond Foundation with the Swiss Christian musician Regula Curti and the Swiss Tibetan Buddhist Dechen Shak-Dagsay. Together they released four albums of spiritual or uplifting music: Buddhist and Christian Prayers in 2009, Children in 2011, Love Within in 2014 and Awakening in 2017.

  Her 2018 memoir My Love Story revealed how close she had come to losing her life. Her high blood pressure, untreated since 1978, damaged her kidneys and led to kidney failure. Three weeks after her 2013 wedding she had a stroke and had to learn to walk again. In 2016 she was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. She tried homeopathy, which worsened her condition. Doctors urged dialysis, and her odds of a transplant looked low. She joined Exit International, an organization that facilitates assisted suicide, which is legal in Switzerland. Then Bach offered one of his kidneys. She accepted, and the transplant took place on the 7th of April 2017.

  Her family carried its own sorrows. In 1986 she wrote that she had become "a little bit estranged" from all her sons except Craig. Craig, a real estate agent, died by apparent suicide in July 2018. "Craig was a troubled soul," she wrote in her memoir. She spread his ashes in the Pacific Ocean off California. Ronnie, who had played bass in a band called Manufactured Funk and toured with her in 1979, was cut off by her in 1989 because he was "determined to be self-destructive." He died of complications from colon cancer in December 2022, and she paid tribute to him on Instagram. Ike Jr., who had worked as a sound engineer at Bolic Sound and co-produced his father's Grammy-winning album Risin' with the Blues, died of kidney failure in October 2025. Michael, her last surviving child, lived in a Southern California convalescent home, and she supported him financially despite limited contact.

  On the 24th of May 2023, Turner died at her home in Küsnacht at the age of 83, after years of illness. She was cremated after a private funeral. Fans covered her Hollywood Walk of Fame star with flowers. They left flowers and candles outside her Swiss home and outside London's Aldwych Theatre, where Tina was playing. On the 25th of May 2023, West End theatres dimmed their lights for two minutes in her memory.

  Mourners among her fellow artists included Beyoncé, Dolly Parton, Debbie Harry, Jimmy Barnes, Bette Midler, Peter Andre, Bryan Adams, Lionel Richie and Elton John. Madonna, Rod Stewart, Lizzo, Brittany Howard, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Cher spoke out as well. Naomi Campbell, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Bassett, Jenifer Lewis, Forest Whitaker and the theater producer Joop van den Ende also paid tribute. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Swiss president Alain Berset issued statements. King Charles III allowed "The Best" to be played during the changing of the guard. In June 2023 Patti LaBelle sang the same song at the BET Awards. In February 2024 Fantasia performed "Proud Mary" at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards.

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