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“I couldn’t believe it the first time I heard this song,” said the singer Bonnie Tyler of Total Eclipse of the Heart, the bombastic 1983 power ballad that became her signature hit. Propelled to No 1 by a gothic video played on heavy rotation in the early years of MTV, it also returned to top the Apple music charts after the North American total solar eclipse of April 2024. “I can’t tell you how many people have told me they had their first dance to this song, they fell in love to this song,” Tyler, who has died aged 75 after a period of ill-health, said on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. “I never get tired of it.”

Total Eclipse of the Heart came nine years after Tyler’s band Imagination had failed to get past the first audition on the ITV talent show New Faces, and eight years after she was spotted singing Freda Payne’s Band of Gold in the Townsman nightclub in her home town of Swansea by a talent scout. Signed to RCA in 1976, she had two transatlantic country-styled hit singles, Lost in France (1976) and It’s a Heartache (1977), before signing to CBS (now Columbia) at a dip in her career in 1981.

Asked by the company’s head of A&R, Muff Winwood, who she would like to work with, she enquired after Jim Steinman, the songwriter for Meat Loaf, whose 1977 album Bat Out of Hell had been a big hit. “[Muff] looked like someone had just told him aliens had landed on the roof of the record company,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir, Straight from the Heart. Steinman initially said no, but had his mind changed after hearing new Tyler demos in a rockier style, adding that she had “an 80s voice that hadn’t been exploited”.

Tyler’s famous huskiness was the result of her not resting long enough after a 1977 operation to remove vocal nodules in her throat. A scream of frustration she gave during recovery added months to its healing. But only three weeks after Tyler met Steinman in New York in 1982, the songwriter presented her with a track he had originally intended for a musical based on Nosferatu. “And I just knew … this was the song I had been waiting for all my life,” she recounted.

The video, which in 2023 exceeded a billion views on YouTube, matched the epic mood of the music. Russell Mulcahy, director of the award-winning video for Ultravox’s Vienna and later of the fantasy action blockbuster Highlander, set it in Holloway Sanatorium, a Victorian gothic hospital in Surrey. Bouffant-haired and buffeted by wind machines, Tyler endured 18-hour days of filming, ending one night at 3.30am “after I’d been chased barefoot through the snow by pagan dancers”. Total Eclipse of the Heart went to No 1 in 10 countries and sold 6m copies worldwide.

But one Steinman collaborator was not happy. “Around the time we were recording, Meat Loaf had lost his voice,” Tyler told the Guardian’s Dave Simpson in 2023. “And after it was a hit he always used to say, ‘Dang. That song should have been mine!’”

She was born Gaynor Hopkins in Skewen, a large village north-east of Swansea, and grew up in a musical family as one of six children. Her mother, Elsie (nee Lewis), was known locally for her singing (“she would be doing the housework with the windows open and people would stop by our hedge because her voice was so beautiful,” Tyler wrote). Her father, Glyndŵr Hopkins, who was unable to work due to tuberculosis, bought the family a tape machine on which Gaynor would record Top of the Pops episodes before singing along to them in her bedroom.

She also survived tuberculosis as a child, a disease discovered at 12 after she reacted to a vaccination and scarring was found on her lungs. A “painfully shy” teenager, she started gaining confidence at 17 after coming second in a Swansea rugby club talent competition, entering it hoping to win the £5 prize and buy false eyelashes with the proceeds.

Using the pseudonym Shereen Davis to distinguish herself from the Welsh star Mary Hopkin, she became a backing singer for a local group, Bobby Wayne & the Dixies, before forming her own group, Imagination, and performing in clubs around her work in a grocery and confectionery warehouse. In 1969 she met Robert Sullivan, later a property developer, and they married in 1973.

Asked by RCA to find a new stage name in 1976, she mixed forenames and surnames from recent newspapers (Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, she said, provided the surname) to come up with Bonnie Tyler. Artists who inspired Tyler’s stagecraft included Tina Turner, who in 1989 had a global hit with a single Tyler had released a year earlier, The Best. “I have to be honest, she did it much better than I did,” Tyler told OutInPerth magazine in 2017 – her straightforward manner saw her booked often on daytime TV chatshows.

Other tracks on her 1988 album, Hide Your Heart, became hits for other artists, including Don’t Turn Around, later a 1988 UK No 1 for Aswad, and Save Up All Your Tears, a 1991 hit for Cher. Tyler also turned down the 1983 James Bond theme, Never Say Never Again. “I just didn’t like the song,” she told the BBC in 2024.

Another Tyler/Steinman collaboration, Holding Out for a Hero (1984), written for the soundtrack to the US musical drama Footloose, became popular in the LGBTQ+ community. She played the New York gay club the Saint in the 1980s (“ it had a fantastic atmosphere and was a little bit naughty,” she told QueerForty magazine) and opened Manchester’s Gay Pride festival in 2009. She also played in the former Soviet Union, and performed at three concerts in the Kremlin.

Alongside 18 studio albums, the most recent of which was The Best Is Yet to Come in 2021, Tyler’s career included playing Polly Garter in George Martin’s 1988 recording of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (narrated by Anthony Hopkins) and collaborations with Mike Oldfield, Rick Wakeman and Rod Stewart. She was still touring the world in recent years, and recorded new vocals in 2025 for David Guetta and Hypaton’s Together, which also included some of the chorus of Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Appointed MBE in 2023, she lived between the Algarve in Portugal and a large Victorian house in Black Pill, near Mumbles, overlooking Swansea Bay.

“I may have done some extraordinary things,” she wrote in her memoir, “but in so many ways, I’m still that young girl from Wales, dancing around the piano with her family, and I always will be.”

She is survived by her husband.

• Bonnie Tyler (Gaynor Sullivan), singer, born 8 June 1951; died 8 July 2026