Tina Turner died of natural causes. This was confirmed by spokespersons for the singer to the British newspaper "Daily Mail", without giving further details. The 83-year-old artist died on Wednesday at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland. After that, there had been speculation, as the native American, who had only had Swiss citizenship since 2013, had a long history of illness.
Turner suffered, among other things, from high blood pressure, which led to kidney damage for a long time if left untreated. In 2016, she was diagnosed with colon cancer, followed by renal insufficiency. During this time, she thought about euthanasia, which is legal in Switzerland. She had already signed up for it, as Turner confessed in her 2018 autobiography "My Love Story". Because her husband Erwin Bach did not want to lose her, he donated a kidney to her in 2017.
Turner had hardly shown or expressed himself in public recently. In April, a questionnaire with her appeared in the "Guardian", in which, when asked how she would like to be remembered, she replied: "As the queen of rock 'n' roll. As a woman who has shown other women that it's okay to succeed on your own terms." When asked what she was most afraid of, Turner said she didn't want to have to go back in time. "I've had to fight so much in life that I just want to look forward."
In doing so, the singer also alluded to her violent former husband Ike Turner and her escape from him in 1976. As the "Stuttgarter Zeitung" reported on Friday, Tina Turner hid at that time, among other things, for almost a month with the befriended couple Jochen and Petra Baeuerle in Stuttgart.
The architect and his wife gave the then forty-six-year-old, who came to Germany with only a small suitcase and 20 dollars, shelter in their house in the Vaihingen residential area of Dachswald. Hidden under a headscarf and incognito without a wig, no one recognized Turner. No one should have known that for a long time, Baeuerle said. Now, after the death of the rock legend, he wanted to speak publicly about this time for the first time.