Tyler died "unexpectedly" in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said Thursday in a statement on her website.
Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins in south Wales in 1951, the fourth of six children of a coal miner and a homemaker.
She started out as a teenage backing singer before releasing several albums of her own in the 1970s.
The gravelly tone that made Bonnie Tyler's singing instantly recognisable was the result of an accident.
After an operation to remove vocal cord nodules in 1977, she was ordered to rest her voice. But one day she screamed in anger, permanently altering it.
Six years on, the Welsh singer would release her best-known song, "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which flaunted her husky sound and was nominated for a Grammy Award. The song has had more that 1 billion streams.
