New York - Tina Turner, whose famous legs, short skirts and spike heels have flashed across the stage nonstop for more than half a century, will turn 70 next week. Turner's enduring popularity resurged in recent months as she pranced through her sold-out Tina! 50th Anniversary Tour through Europe and North America. By tour's end in May, it had grossed 130 million dollars.
Hanes, which makes ladies' stockings, capitalized on her fabulous legs for years, turning her into a television and magazine icon, even after she switched Capri pants on stage.
Rolling Stone calls Turner "one of the greatest singers of all times," and she has sold 200 million records and more concert tickets than any other solo performer in history.
Turner is taking another pause in her career, but if the past is any clue, she will rebound onstage again. She's declared her retirement five times, only to leap back on stage looking as though time has stood still: No sign of age or exhaustion, no loss of vitality or erotic charisma.
Nevertheless, Turner insists she loves her peace.
"I simply like to be at home. I can listen to the music I like, and drink my favourite wine," she told a German talk show in June.
Turner's life partner is German record executive Erwin Bach, whom she met at Heathrow Airport in 1985. After living in Cologne, she moved in 1994 with Bach to Zurich. The couple also has homes in southern France and California. She once said of Bach: "Wherever he goes, I go."
Turner was born on November 26, 1939, as Anna Mae Bullock in Brownsville, Tennessee. Her father worked on a cotton plantation, her mother had Indian ancestry. She grew up in a gospel church, but has practiced Buddhism since the 1970s.
After high school, the young woman with striking appearance moved to the Blues metropolis of its time, St. Louis, where she met Ike Turner, the guitarist who was eight years her senior.
Their first single, Fool in Love, stormed to the top of the Hit Parade. Her breakthrough as a soloist came with River Deep Mountain High, written for her by Phil Spector in 1966. When the married couple made their first warm-up appearance for the Rolling Stones in 1969, they clinched their hold on white music lovers.
But the Ike and Tina success story hit a stone wall with Ike's drug addiction, philandering and brutality.
After she was beaten again, this time severely, by Ike on July 2, 1976, in a hotel room in Dallas, Texas, she massaged him to sleep - then packed up the four childrren: her own two sons with Ike and two step childre.
She fled without a penny in her pocket, but her actions served as an inspiration for thousands of women who lived with daily terror of domestic abuse.
During the divorce, Tina renouncedany support from Ike and all rights to their shared music. When she started her solo career in 1984 in New York, she was half a million dollars in debt and lived from social welfare.
That same year, the 45-year-old won four Grammys for her comeback album Private Dancer, and appeared with Mel Gibson as Aunt Entity in Mad Max - Beyond Thunderdome.
Other film roles followed, as did another ten albums, high honours from the music industry and the certainty that she had left most of her colleagues behind her in the dust. Only Marlene Dietrich persevered longer, appearing at age 73 in a long evening gown in her One Woman Show, where she did little more than talk.
The dynamo Tina, on the other hand, still dances and shakes a leg, even if she's started wearing those pants instead of her trademark skinny skirt.
