Tina Turner

Anna Mae Bullock arrived at a Los Angeles recording studio in 1975 with no money and a face marked by bruises. Ken Russell had cast her as the Acid Queen in Tommy, the film adaptation of The Who's rock opera. That four-minute psychedelic sequence in front of the camera opened her eyes: film and a solo career on stage were her only way out of ending up dead at Ike Turner's hands.

Soon after, she escaped from a Dallas hotel with thirty-six cents in her pocket and a gas station credit card that didn't even work.

For almost a decade, she cleaned other people's houses and performed in seedy nightclubs to pay off the millions of dollars of debt her ex-husband had left in her name after their legal split. No one in the music industry wanted to sign a Black woman approaching forty who carried the stigma of the Southern vaudeville circuit. But Tina knew her live energy did not belong to the past.

The Australian Box Office Heist

In 1984, the album Private Dancer blew past commercial expectations, selling more than ten million copies. That commercial explosion whetted Hollywood's appetite, as the studios had long been looking for a wild personality to revive struggling franchises.

George Miller called her without an audition to co-star in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome alongside Mel Gibson. The Australian director designed the character of Aunty Entity around a physical presence capable of commanding respect from a horde of desert barbarians without throwing a single punch.

She shot in the Coober Pedy desert in temperatures approaching 45 degrees Celsius while wearing a chainmail costume weighing more than thirty kilos made from wire and car springs. She also insisted on driving the modified vehicles herself during the desert chase sequences.

And the move paid off at the box office.

The film grossed thirty-six million dollars in the United States alone during the summer of 1985. It also placed two singles at the top of international sales charts, including the film's theme song, We Don’t Need Another Hero, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination.

The biopic nightmare and the Swiss retreat

Tina's relationship with the big screen was always marked by critical distance and an outright rejection of cheap nostalgia. When Touchstone Pictures bought the rights to her autobiography I, Tina to make What's Love Got to Do with It in 1993, she flatly refused to watch the final cut. She was content to supervise the music recordings and lend her original wardrobe to Angela Bassett.

She couldn't bear to relive the beatings, sexual abuse and confinement she had endured during her marriage on the movie screen.

That same year she made a brief cameo in Last Action Hero by John McTiernan, playing the Mayor of Los Angeles, and in 1995 she provided the voice for the main theme of GoldenEye, written by Bono and The Edge for Pierce Brosnan's debut as agent 007. It was her last technical contribution to a major international franchise.

From then on, she guarded her private life closely.

She made her permanent home in the Swiss town of Küsnacht, on the shores of Lake Zurich. She gave up US citizenship in 2013 after obtaining a Swiss passport, and in 2021 she sold her entire music catalog and image rights to BMG for fifty million dollars. She died in that same house in May 2023 from multiple organ failure after years of battling high blood pressure, a kidney transplant and intestinal cancer diagnosed in 2016.