"Total Eclipse of the Heart" is a song recorded by Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler. It was written and produced by Jim Steinman, and released on Tyler's fifth studio album, Faster Than the Speed of Night (1983). The song was released as a single by CBS/Columbia in 1983.
The song became Tyler's biggest career hit, topping the UK Singles Chart, and becoming the fifth-best-selling single in 1983 in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the single spent four weeks at the top of the charts, keeping another Steinman penned song "Making Love Out of Nothing at All" by Air Supply from reaching the top spot (a song Tyler would later cover in 1995), and it was Billboard's number-six song of the year for 1983.
The song was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
The music video for "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was directed by Russell Mulcahy[24] and was filmed on location at the Holloway Sanatorium, a large Victorian Gothic hospital near Virginia Water, Surrey, England.
The video features Bonnie Tyler clad in white, dreaming or fantasizing about her students in a boys' boarding school. Young men are seen dancing and participating in various school activities and singing in a choir.
A long-running urban legend is that the boy who appears throughout the video and who shakes Tyler's hand at the end is former Italian footballer Gianfranco Zola. In a 2012 interview, Zola confirmed that he did not appear in the video.