Mary Carr: 'Let's not forget the true story of Tina Turner's survival'

In death as in life, Tina Turner is cast as the unstoppable star, who left a violent marriage and launched a glittering career of her own.

Her resilience and strength are held up as an example to the so called ‘snowflake generation’, and everyone who wallows in the zeitgeist’s glorification of victimhood, to buck up and get on with their lives without complaining.

How quickly the 2021 documentary, Tina, is forgotten. It exploded the neat narrative of her survival story, showing a woman still haunted by her brutal marriage almost half a century after it ended, still having regular nightmares about being tortured and attacked, still processing her trauma.

Tina’s pain was so palpable that the documentary makers shied away from asking her directly about it.

Ike & Tina Turner, c 1972, pose for a portrait with their son and step-sons in circa 1972. Clockwise from bottom left: Michael Turner (Son of Ike & Lorraine Taylor), Ike Turner, Jr. (Son of Ike & Lorraine Taylor), Ike Turner, Craig Hill (Son of Tina & Raymond Hill), Ronnie Turner (Son of Ike & Tina). Pic: Getty Images

The documentary also showed that, far from bursting onto the scene with her number one single What’s Love Got to Do With it? – a sweet symphony of revenge against the repellent Ike – that Tina, above, spent a long time in the wilderness in Vegas trying to carve out a solo career.

The world knows a lot more about domestic and gender-based violence today than it did when Tina Turner blew the lid on her horrific marriage.

She publicly set the record straight about their abuse, how they were subject to the tyranny of Svengali-type figures or the humiliations of the casting couch.

Yet the facile narrative about Tina Turner’s escape and subsequent triumph shows how the complexities of domestic abuse – of its legacy lasting a lifetime, obliterated neither by fame, fortune or great happiness – have barely sunk in.

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