Star Tina: Princess is Simply the Best
‘DYSLEXIC BEA SAVED ME’
SINGER Tina Turner has told how Princess Beatrice helped beat her shame over dyslexia.
Tina, 79, was tormented by her reading and writing difficulties when she was a child, and felt deeply “ashamed”.
But when the Queen’s granddaughter Beatrice, 30, went public about her own dyslexia diagnosis the rock legend finally started to feel better about herself.
Tina said that her hellish school days scarred her for life. And she recalled how one day she had “freaked out” in the classroom.
The Simply The Best singer said: “I was not a good student, so I lived in fear of being called to the blackboard.
“One day, my teacher asked me to come up to solve an arithmetic problem. Panic set in. Not that I would have said the word ‘embarrassed’ then. I would have said ‘ashamed’ – ashamed that I was standing there in front of all the other kids, failing, with numbers blurring in front of me because of my tears.”
In her memoirs My Love Story, Tina added: “I finally got over my lifelong sense of inadequacy when Princess Beatrice, Queen Elizabeth’s grand-daughter, discussed her dyslexia in a number of interviews.
“She said that she wasn’t able to count and that she had a hard time learning how to read. She could have been describing me.
“For the first time, I truly understood what my problem was, and felt better about myself. “