Jon Bon Jovi has remembered his mother as “a force to be reckoned with” after her death at the age of 83.
The rocker, 62, hailed his mother Carol Bongiovi’s “spirit and can-do attitude”.
The former Playboy bunny and US Marine died three days short of her 84th birthday at Monmouth Medical Centre in Long Branch, New Jersey.
Bongiovi, who was an entrepreneur, founded her son’s band’s fan club and operated a number of businesses.
Speaking on behalf of the family, Bon Jovi said in a statement: “Our mother was a force to be reckoned with, her spirit and can-do attitude shaped this family. She will be greatly missed.”
Bongiovi enlisted in the US Marine Corps in 1959, where she met her future husband, John Bongiovi, Sr, to whom she was married for 63 years.
A 2005 biography by Laura Jackson, titled Jon Bon Jovi revealed that Carol, played a significant role in nurturing his musical talents from an early age.
According to Variety, she bought him an acoustic guitar and encouraged him to learn to play, which he took seriously during his teenage years. The book describes how the matriarch “would line up with her elder son before a full-length mirror (where) together they had fun watching themselves perform songs.”
In November 2020, the I'll Be There for You artist shared that his parents had given him and his siblings "the ability to make the dream a reality."
He told The Big Issue: “Even if you truly weren't any good at your craft, if you believed you were, you could work on it.
“As I got older I realized that was a great gift that I got from my folks.
“They truly believed in the John Kennedy mantra of going to the moon. ‘Yeah, of course you can go to the moon. Just go, Johnny.’ And there I went.”
She is survived by her husband and their three sons and daughters-in-law – the Bon Jovi star and his wife Dorothea, their son Anthony and his wife Nina Yang Bongiovi, and their son Matthew and his wife Desiree Bongiovi, as well as her eight grandchildren.
Among her grandchildren is the actor and model Jake Bongiovi, who is married to Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown.
