International

TINA TURNER bids a final farewell to her fans in a touching new film that shows how she has overcome her painful past and finally found happiness.

In the feature-length documentary, simply titled Tina, the singer looks back on camera for the first time at her younger years filled with struggle and pain, then the true love and global fame she found as a middle-aged woman.

Now 81 and plagued by ill health, including a stroke and cancer, the soul and rock music legend also suffered kidney failure which led to a transplant in 2017.

In the film she tells how she wants to enter the third and final chapter of her life out of the spotlight, and it is revealed that she has a form of post-traumatic stress disorder from the domestic abuse she suffered at the hands of her first husband and music partner, Ike Turner.

Looking back, Tina reflects: “It wasn’t a good life. The good did not balance the bad.

“I had an abusive life, there’s no other way to tell the story. It’s a reality. It’s a truth. That’s what you’ve got, so you have to accept it.

     'I SHOULD BE PROUD'
     “Some people say the life that I lived and the performances that I gave, the appreciation, is blasting with the people. And yeah, I should be proud of that. I am.

“But when do you stop being proud? I mean, when do you, how do you bow out slowly? Just go away?”

In the documentary, which airs on Sky this month, Tina is seen for the first time talking with the man who finally brought her happiness, her second husband, Erwin Bach.

The couple make a farewell trip to the US for the Broadway premiere of her stage show, The Tina Turner Story, and Erwin, 65, reveals on camera: “She said, ‘I’m going to America to say goodbye to my American fans and I’ll wrap it up’. And I think this documentary and the play, this is it — it’s a closure.”

The details of Tina’s life have been chronicled before, first in her 1986 autobiography, I, Tina, and in the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It? with Angela Bassett as Tina.

But Tina has always been loath to discuss them on camera until now. This documentary will have been painful to make, but is a parting gift to her global army of fans.

She is bringing down the curtain on a career which saw her sell more than 100million records, and at her peak in the Eighties sell out arenas around the globe.

Tina was born Anna Mae Bullock, and her childhood was filled with poverty and misery, picking cotton in the fields around Nutbush, Tennessee.

‘MOM WAS NOT KIND...SHE DIDN'T LIKE ME’
     Her mother, Zelma, suffered domestic abuse at the hands of her father, Floyd Bullock, before they both abandoned her as a child. Even when Tina was reunited with her mother when she was a superstar, Zelma was cold and unloving.

Tina says in the documentary: “Mom was not kind. When I became a star, of course back then she was happy because I bought her a house. I did all kinds of things for her, she was my mother.

“I was trying to make her comfortable because she didn’t have a husband, she was alone, but she still didn’t like me.

“Even after I became Tina, Ma was still a little bit like, ‘Who did that?’ and ‘Who did this?’ And I said, ‘I did that, Mom!’ I was happy to show my mother what I did. I had a house, I had got a car, and she said, ‘No, I don’t believe it. No, you’re my daughter, no you didn’t!’