Tina Turner: A Love Story in Two Acts

Tina Turner's life is, among many other things, an unusually well-documented case study in what a relationship can survive and what it eventually has to leave behind. In the article below, I look at both halves of that story: the marriage she escaped, and the one she built afterward, on the other side of the world, in Switzerland.

If her account of leaving resonates with you — the years it can take to prepare an exit, the strength it demands — I've written Breaking Free from Toxic Relationships, a clinical guide on recognising a relationship that is harming you and rebuilding afterward. And if what stays with you is less the escape than what came after — how someone rebuilds a capacity for love and stability decades later — I've also put together a psychological resilience test that looks at your own. And if it's your own relationship's exchanges you'd rather look at directly, ScanMyLove gives you an objective, structured read of how you and your partner actually communicate.

A Marriage That Began as a Duo and Became a Prison

Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on 26 November 1939 in Nutbush, Tennessee. She was still a teenager, singing with a touring band called the Kings of Rhythm, when she met its saxophonist, Raymond Hill, and had her first son, Craig, in 1958. It was through Hill that she met the band's leader, Ike Turner, who would go on to adopt Craig and, in 1962, marry her. Together they built one of the most commercially successful and critically admired duos of the era, culminating in a Grammy-winning cover of "Proud Mary" in 1972.

What the public saw on stage bore little resemblance to what she later described in private. In her memoirs, first in I, Tina (1986) and again in My Love Story (2018), Turner documented years of physical abuse: being burned by hot coffee thrown in her face, punched in the face, and having her jaw broken. She wrote that Ike "needed to control me, economically, and psychologically, so I could never leave him" — her own reading, decades later, of what she believed drove his behaviour. She also described the wedding night itself, when Ike took her to a sexually explicit show: "I was miserable the whole time, on the verge of tears, but there was no escape." Of their sexual relationship during the marriage, she wrote that it had become "an expression of hostility — a kind of rape — especially when it began or ended with a beating." These are her own words, published under her own name, not a reconstruction offered by anyone else on her behalf.

The Night She Tried to Leave the Only Way She Knew How

In 1968, at a low point in the marriage, Turner attempted to take her own life by overdose. She was hospitalised and treated. In her memoir, she wrote that at the time she had convinced herself "that death was my only way out." By her own account, Ike came to see her in the hospital the next day and told her she should die — a detail that comes from her own retelling rather than from any independent witness, and is presented here as such: what she has said happened, not an established fact beyond her testimony.

The suicide attempt did not end the marriage, but something else, a few years later, gave her a different kind of exit. Around the mid-1970s, Turner began practising Nichiren Buddhist chanting — "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo" — after someone in her circle introduced her to it. She later described the practice as giving her a structured, repeatable source of resolve, something she could return to daily regardless of what was happening around her. This is not being offered here as a clinical explanation of how she coped; it is what she herself, repeatedly and consistently across interviews and her memoirs, said helped her prepare the exit she eventually made. As I explore in my book Breaking Free from Toxic Relationships, this is a pattern I see again and again: the resolve to leave rarely arrives all at once, it's built gradually, often through a small, repeatable practice that has nothing to do with the relationship itself.

On 27 July 1976, Turner left. She fled with 36 cents and a Mobil gas card, found a room at a nearby Ramada Inn, and filed for divorce citing irreconcilable differences. The divorce was finalised in 1978; she walked away from the settlement with almost nothing except the right to keep performing under the name "Tina Turner." Her solo career struggled for years afterward, before the 1984 album Private Dancer and its number-one single, "What's Love Got to Do with It," turned her into a global star in her own right — evidence, documented in record sales and chart history, of a rebuilding that took place entirely outside the relationship that had defined her twenties and thirties.

A Different Kind of First Meeting

In 1985, Turner met Erwin Bach, a German music executive then working for EMI, when he was sent to collect her from Düsseldorf airport ahead of a concert. She described the moment in My Love Story in strikingly physical terms: "He had the prettiest face. You could not miss it. […] My heart went bu-bum. […] My hands were ice-cold. So this is what they call love at first sight, I thought. Oh my God, I am not ready for this." It is a self-reported account of what she felt in that instant — not something an outside observer could verify, but something she chose, repeatedly, to put in her own name in print.

What followed was not a quick remarriage. Turner and Bach were a couple for close to three decades before marrying, and by some accounts he proposed twice, twenty-three years apart, before she said yes. In the mid-1990s, after ending a major tour, the couple settled in Switzerland, in a lakeside property she would later call home for the rest of her life. In January 2013, Turner gave up her United States citizenship to become a Swiss citizen. On 4 July 2013, after twenty-seven years together, she and Bach married in a civil ceremony on the shore of Lake Zurich, followed days later by a larger celebration at their Swiss residence attended by around 120 guests, including Oprah Winfrey and David Bowie. Of that relationship, she wrote: "He shows me that true love doesn't require the dimming of my light so that he can shine. On the contrary, we are the light of each other's lives, and we want to shine as bright as we can, together."

Illness, a Kidney, and a Choice She Later Described Openly

The years after the wedding brought a sequence of serious health crises: a stroke in 2013, intestinal cancer in 2016 requiring surgery, and kidney failure in 2017. Turner later wrote that she had been "on such a wild roller-coaster in the four years since my wedding that even I have difficulty keeping my medical catastrophes straight." At what she has described as her lowest point during the kidney crisis, several accounts drawing on her own statements report that she looked into an assisted-dying programme available in Switzerland — a fact reported here as a documented episode in her own account of that period, not as commentary on the legality or ethics of such programmes generally.

Bach's response, by her account, was to offer one of his own kidneys. "He said he didn't want another woman, or another life. Then he shocked me. He said he wanted to give me one of his kidneys," she wrote. The transplant took place in 2017. She described the recovery in similarly personal terms: "The best moment was when Erwin came rolling into my room in his wheelchair. …] I was so emotional — happy, overwhelmed and relieved that we'd come through this alive." As I discuss in my book <strong>[Saving Your Relationship: Communication, Crises, and Renewal, a health crisis like this one tends to reveal, more than create, how solid a partnership already is — it rarely builds commitment from nothing.

Two Losses Before Her Own

Turner outlived two of her sons. Craig Turner, her eldest, born in 1958 to Raymond Hill and later adopted by Ike Turner, died in 2018, in what multiple outlets reported at the time as an apparent suicide. Ronnie Turner, her son with Ike Turner, died on 8 December 2022 at the age of 62; an autopsy by the Los Angeles County coroner's office attributed his death to complications of metastatic colon cancer, with cardiovascular disease as a contributing factor. Tina Turner herself died on 24 May 2023, at 83, at her home in Küsnacht, near Zurich — the country she had chosen, by then, for three decades.

What This Story Documents, and What It Cannot

Everything above comes from Turner's own published words or from dated, sourced, cross-checked reporting: a marriage that began as a professional partnership and became, by her own repeated account, violent; an exit that took years of preparation and a single moment of resolve; a second relationship that started with what she called love at first sight and lasted, in one form or another, for nearly four decades. None of it supports a diagnosis of what happened inside either relationship beyond what she chose to disclose. What it does support, as a matter of public record rather than interpretation, is a life in which the same person who nearly died at 28 trying to leave one marriage chose, decades later and in a different country, to build another one on entirely different terms — and said so, plainly, in her own words.

Also Read

• Nathalie's Journey: Breaking the Cycle of Domestic Violence
• Love After 40: Why It's Easier & How to Find It Now

FAQ

Why did Tina Turner leave Ike Turner?

In her memoirs I, Tina (1986) and My Love Story (2018), Turner documented years of physical abuse during their marriage, including being burned and having her jaw broken. She fled on 27 July 1976 with 36 cents and a Mobil gas card and filed for divorce, finalised in 1978.

Who was Tina Turner's second husband?

Erwin Bach, a German music executive she met in 1985. The couple were together for close to three decades before marrying in a civil ceremony on the shore of Lake Zurich on 4 July 2013, the same year Turner gave up her US citizenship to become Swiss.

Why did Tina Turner move to Switzerland?

She settled there with Erwin Bach in the mid-1990s, in a lakeside property near Zurich that became her home for the rest of her life. She became a Swiss citizen in January 2013 and died at that home, in Küsnacht, on 24 May 2023.