Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock, in Brownsville, Tennessee on 26 November, 1939, the daughter of migrant workers who soon abandoned her to the care of her grandmother.

She grew up dirt-poor in rural Nutbush, worked in the cotton fields as a child, and found a ray of hope while singing in her church choir.

When she was Ike Turner, whose hot dance band The Kings of Rhythm headlined the bill at St. Louis' Manhattan Club. It was Ike who renamed Anna Mae, Tina, soon changing the band's name to the Ike and Tina Turner Review and creating what Richard Harrington in The Washington Post has called " one of the most explosive stage shows in America."

She left the abusive marriage (with Ike) in 1976, with only the clothes on her back, penniless and unsure of the prospects of a career on her own.

In 1985, Tina Turner appeared as Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with Mel Gibson, and scored another hit with the movie's theme song, 'We Don't Need Another Hero'.

She gained great popularity throughout Europe and moved there permanently in 1986 to share a home with Erwin Bach, a German-born EMI record company executive 16 years her junior. In addition to a lakeshore home on the Goldküste, the most exclusive district of Zurich, Switzerland, Turner has an estate in France at Villefranche-sur-Mer, a small town about 4 miles (6km) east of the city of Nice