My Tina Turner is Aunty Entity in ‘Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome

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Inspirational, powerful and legendary are words associated with describing Tina Turner’s incredible career that spanned six decades, sold more than 200 million albums and received eight grammy awards.

Straight up, I never owned any Tina Turner albums, or have a stash downloaded on my phone’s Deezer account, but I know many of her songs. 

I am not a fan but when the news arrived that she had died I had to let my significant other know. I hollered “Tina Turner died!” “Really? Oh no!” returned the voice still in bed.

I knew she had survived an abusive marriage to a man named Ike Turner and that they were a music couple like Sonny and Cher, and they had reasonable success.

She left him and then went on to become a global superstar, selling millions of albums with songs like Private Dancer and Simply the Best. Songs that South Africans adored and could be heard regularly in supermarkets, company braais, corporate team-building events and Christmas parties. 

All good and well, but really not “my thing”.

For me, my Tina Turner was Aunt Entity, the savvy, gritty ruler of Bartertown in the 1985 movie, Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome.  That was a Tina I could appreciate. Post-apocalyptic glamour queen.

Mad Max is a dystopian action film series that follows the adventures of Rockatansky, a police officer in a future Australia, which is experiencing societal collapse because of war and critical shortages of essential resources.

“But he is just a raggedy man.” Her first words in the film. 

The hero, played by Mel Gibson, has just been escorted by Aunty’s grumbling, crossdressing Sigue Sigue Sputnik inspired henchmen up to her chambers to meet Aunty and audition for a job.

After some chit-chat she asks, “Do you want to hear my life story?” 

Before Max can answer she continues, “I was nobody, except on the day after [the apocalypse] I was still alive. This nobody had a chance to be somebody. So much for history.” 

She knew what she was talking about, be it in the dystopian world of Mad Max or the real world Deep South where she grew up. She had to fight to get to where she was. She was a survivor.

Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on 26 November 1939 in Brownsville, Tennessee. She recalled picking cotton at an early age, where her father worked as an overseer of the sharecroppers.

Sharecropping is a legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. It was a humble start for someone who’s musical legacy is indisputable, with a list of honours and achievements that are truly impressive, easily validating her title as The Queen of Rock n’ Roll. Turner’s net worth at the time of her death was estimated at $250 million.

Turner also acted in Tommy (1975) as the Acid Queen, an erratic prostitute who deals in prophetic LSD. The name Tina was inspired by Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a comic-book character that first appeared in the late 1930s. I think we can see a theme is starting to emerge here.

In Mad Max her name is Aunty Entity, but she was a queen. The queen of Bartertown, a powerful and determined ruler, whose character was inspired by the real world Tina Turner. 

Director George Miller said, “We needed someone whose vitality and intelligence would make her control over Bartertown credible. She had to be a positive character rather than a conventional evil ‘bad guy’. We had worked on the script with [Turner] in mind. But we had no idea if she’d be interested.”

Long live Queen Tina. She was a transcender, a survivor and powerful role model, a true legend, rock n’ roll queen and, for me, the amazing Aunty Entity.