Tina Turner bids farewell in doccie

Music legend Tina Turner, pictured, is the subject of one of the most successful biopics ever made, but she tells the makers of a new documentary there’s much more to her story.

Tina by Oscar-winning directors Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin premiered on Tuesday at the Berlin film festival. It traces Turner’s six-decade career as an unlikely triumph over abuse and discrimination.

Paired with the musical about her that had its Broadway premiere in 2019 until the pandemic shut it down, the film is billed as the 81-year-old Turner’s farewell to her legions of fans.

The documentary includes interviews with the singer in which she recounts her childhood of grinding poverty picking cotton in the Tennessee fields, her singing debut with violent husband Ike Turner and her lonely years even as the world’s top female rock star.

Friends weigh in, including Oprah Winfrey, I, Tina biographer Kurt Loder and Angela Bassett, who was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Turner in the 1993 blockbuster What’s Love Got to Do with It.

Turner was famously critical of the movie, refusing to watch it for several years and rejecting her depiction as a “victim” in it.

In the documentary, she explains that the reason she decided to come forward in the 1980s about her years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse by Ike was that even after the split, interviewers insisted on asking her about their partnership. “I felt that’s one way I could get the journalists off my back.”

The documentary also spotlights the obstacles Turner had to surmount to become a stadium-filling sex symbol as a black middle-aged woman. It includes a shocking interview in which a record company executive is quoted using racist and misogynistic slurs to explain why he wanted to drop her from the label in the early 1980s. –