Tina Turner, who wed musician Ike Turner after falling in love with him as a young adult, has frequently written and spoken about the years of horrific abuse she endured throughout their marriage. A recent documentary on the artist’s life gives a brutally honest account of how they marked it.
The 81-year-old diva admitted in the film that she still has flashbacks to the torture she endured from the artist, particularly while she was carrying their son Ronnie. In her words, “This scene keeps coming back, you dream, the genuine vision is there.” She characterized it as a curse.
In the 1980s, when domestic abuse was hardly ever acknowledged by international celebrities or in the media, the singer is praised for speaking out against it. However, Tina insists that she didn’t say those things with the objective of deflecting reporters’ inquiries regarding her relationship with Ike.
As a child abuse victim herself, Oprah Winfrey observed, “No one was talking about sexual abuse, physical violence, domestic abuse, or point abuse.”
The divorce in 1978 left Tina with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which had been made worse by the numerous medical problems she had been dealing with in recent years, as she also admitted in the documentary.
When describing how she was when she first met her, her current spouse compared her to a soldier returning from battle.
Tina suffered a stroke in 2013, just a few weeks after she wed producer Erwin Bach. She was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2016. Her son, Craig, took his own life in 2018 at the age of 59 due to alcohol consumption that made him feel more depressed and alone.
The film not only covers the singer’s personal setbacks but also details how she fought harassment and discrimination in her professional life. Tina Turner aged 45 when Private Dancer, which she sees as her real debut, was released in 1984.
The Oscar-winning directors Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s farewell to the singer, Tina, which had its world premiere earlier this month at the Berlin Film Festival, will debut on HBO on March 27.
