What Happened To The Model From The Van Halen Hot For Teacher Video?
What Happened To The Model From The Van Halen Hot For Teacher Video?
Ah, the ’80s. A decade that couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to be when it grew up. It was self-referential, outlandish, and a little ashamed of its roots, disco was roundly derided, despite selling millions of dance tunes. And while video didn’t actually kill the radio star, MTV was playing little short films wrapped around music singles, and lots of people took notice.
Witness Van Halen, the band composed of brothers Eddie and Alex Van Halen on guitar and drums respectively, with Michael Anthony playing bass and David Lee Roth as singer/frontman/showman/hair. The band gelled in 1974 and cut an album four years later with financial backing from KISS’s Gene Simmons, according to Biography. And it sold well, but the real success (and, presumably, the real money) came with 1984’s 1984, which included such chart-smashing cuts as “Panama,” “Jump,” and “Hot for Teacher”, the subject of today’s lesson.
Roth is credited with co-directing the video, along with Pete Angelus, director on the band’s videos for “Jump” and “Panama,” says Song Facts. The video begins with Waldo, the already awkward new kid in school who’s terrified, and then the teacher walks in, who turns out to be, well, attractive, by most standards.
The woman playing the teacher with dance moves was Lillian Müller, a native of Norway who’d already had a decent MTV gig, says Ultimate Classic Rock, as part of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” six years earlier.
Müller had started as a model in Western Europe, appearing, according to her website, in the pages of French Vogue and modeling in London. That led to yet another bit of pop culture infamy: Müller was named Playboy’s Playmate of the Year in 1976. Her website relates that Lillian went on to become the most featured “Playmate Of The Year” in the magazine’s history, scoring nine covers from 1975-1999.
As for her “Hot for Teacher” performance: A Guitar World article from 2012 quotes Müller this way: “I was in my early 30s at the time. I was a little old for the role.”
