Patricia Mae Giraldo (née Andrzejewski; formerly and still professionally Benatar; born January 10, 1953) is an American singer and songwriter.

Two hit singles from the album were released: "Heartbreaker" and "We Live for Love", the latter written by her lead guitarist and future husband, Neil Giraldo.

Her next release, Get Nervous (1982), sold less well than her previous two albums, but did include the North American hit "Shadows of the Night".

Benatar's 1985 album, Seven the Hard Way, sold less well, but it yielded two singles harking back to the rock vein: "Invincible", a top 10 hit in North America, and "Sex as a Weapon".

Her follow-up, Wide Awake in Dreamland (1988), marked a resurgence in sales in Canada and Australia, and was her biggest hit in the UK.

Pat Benatar was born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski on January 10, 1953, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York City.

[3] Her mother, Mildred (née Knapp; 1928–2016), was a beautician, and her father, Andrew (Andrzej) Andrzejewski (1926–2009), was a sheet-metal worker.

[5] Her family moved to North Hamilton Avenue in Lindenhurst, New York, a village in the Long Island town of Babylon.

[6] She trained as a coloratura with plans to attend the Juilliard School, but decided instead to pursue health education at Stony Brook University.

[7][8] Benatar quit her job to pursue a singing career after being inspired by a Liza Minnelli concert she saw in Richmond.

The period also yielded Benatar's first single: "Day Gig" (1974), written and produced by Coxon and given a limited local release.

Her rendition of Judy Garland's "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" earned her a callback by club owner Rick Newman, who then became her manager; she became a regular performer at Catch a Rising Star for the next three years.

In late 1975 she landed the part of Zephyr in Harry Chapin's futuristic rock musical, The Zinger, which ran for a month in 1976 at the Performing Arts Foundation's (PAF) Playhouse in Huntington Station, Long Island.

She entered a Halloween contest at the Cafe Figaro in Greenwich Village dressed as a character from the film Cat-Women of the Moon.

[9] Between appearances at Catch a Rising Star, she recorded commercial jingles for Pepsi-Cola and a number of regional brands.

She headlined New York City's Tramps nightclub over four days in spring 1978, where her performance was heard by representatives from several record companies.

[15] "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" (US number 9) was her first single to break the US Top 10 and sold more than one million copies (Gold status) in the United States.

It was her fourth consecutive RIAA and CRIA Platinum certification, and "Shadows of the Night" garnered Benatar her third Grammy, again for "Best Female Rock Vocal Performance".

The WWII-themed music video for "Shadows of the Night" featured then-unknown actors Judge Reinhold as an American fighter copilot and Bill Paxton as a German radio operator.

By then, her sound had mellowed from hard rock to more atmospheric pop and the story-based video clip for "Love Is a Battlefield" was aimed squarely at MTV, even featuring Benatar in a Michael Jackson-inspired group dance number, using Jackson's Beat It director Bob Giraldi and choreographer Michael Peters.

The song also netted Benatar her fourth consecutive Grammy Award for "Best Female Rock Vocal Performance".

[citation needed] In July 1988, Benatar released her seventh studio album, Wide Awake in Dreamland, which generally improved on the success of Seven the Hard Way, such as peaking at number 11 in the UK and Canada,[22] earning her eighth consecutive Platinum certified album in Canada, and number 13 in Australia.

"Somebody's Baby" was instead released as the single to Top 40 radio and a music video produced, but it did not chart in the US and was only a minor success in some other countries, including peaking at number 41 in Canada.

In September of the same year she again teamed with songwriter and producer Linda Perry for the song "Dancing Through the Wreckage", which was the lead single from the soundtrack for the documentary Served Like a Girl.

In 2020, she was nominated for induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside fifteen other artists but despite coming in second in the fan vote was not among the inductees.

[28] On July 22, 2022, she announced she would stop performing "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" on her current tour "in deference to the victims of the families of these [recent] mass shootings".

reality television series Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive and Relatively Famous: Ranch Rules, in late 2005 and early 2022 respectively.

Benatar's memoir touches on her battles with her record company Chrysalis, the difficulties that her career caused in her personal life, and feminism.

In the memoir, she is quoted as saying, "For every day since I was old enough to think, I've considered myself a feminist … It's empowering to watch and to know that, perhaps in some way, I made the hard path [women] have to walk just a little bit easier.

[40] Although billed as a solo artist, Benatar recorded and toured with a consistent set of band members over most of her career: