Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh singer whose distinctive rasp turned power ballads into anthems and made "Total Eclipse of the Heart" one of the defining songs of the 1980s, has died at the age of 75. Her family and team said she died in hospital in Portugal following an illness, the BBC reported. She had undergone emergency surgery earlier in the year and had been treated in intensive care.

The voice

Born Gaynor Hopkins in 1951 in Skewen, a village in South Wales, she took the stage name Bonnie Tyler early in a career that began in local clubs. The husky, weathered quality that became her signature followed surgery on her vocal cords in the late 1970s, and it gave her a sound unlike almost anyone else in pop, often likened to Rod Stewart. It was a voice built for big emotions, and she found songs to match.

The hits

Her first major success came in 1977 with "It's a Heartache," a transatlantic hit that announced her. But it was her collaboration with the producer Jim Steinman that produced her most enduring work. "Total Eclipse of the Heart," released in 1983, was a vast, operatic ballad that went to number one in the United Kingdom, the United States and beyond, and it remains a karaoke and radio staple more than four decades on. The following year she recorded another Steinman-style epic, "Holding Out for a Hero," which became a favorite in films and, later, a nostalgic standard, NBC News reported.

A long career

Tyler never quite matched that commercial peak again, but she did not need to. She toured for decades, remained hugely popular across continental Europe, and kept recording into her seventies. In 2013 she represented the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest, and in recent years she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for her services to music. She was, by any measure, a survivor in an industry that discards many, sustained by a voice audiences recognized in an instant.

What she leaves

Bonnie Tyler belonged to a moment when the power ballad sat at the center of pop, sincere, oversized and unafraid of drama, and she sang those songs with total conviction. That commitment, more than any single record, was her signature: she meant every soaring line. She is survived by her husband, Robert Sullivan, to whom she was married for more than half a century. Her biggest songs, played at weddings, in films and on late-night radio, will outlast the sad news of her passing.