Pat Benatar

Pat Benatar is an American singer-songwriter whose four-decade music career has produced multiple defining 1980s American rock-music albums — particularly her four consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance across 1980–1983 (the longest such consecutive Grammy Award win streak by any female rock vocalist at the time). She was born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski on January 10, 1953, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York City, into a working-class American Polish-Catholic-and-Irish-American family. Her father Andrew Andrzejewski was a Polish-American sheet-metal-business worker, and her mother Mildred Andrzejewski was a homemaker.

Her teenage and early-adulthood music career across 1968–1975 — across multiple Long Island-area classical-vocal-and-musical-theater training engagements (particularly her 1968 admission to the Long Island School of Vocal Music) — preceded her 1975 first marriage to Dennis Benatar (whose surname she retained for her stage name). Her 1975 New York-area cabaret-and-club-singing career across multiple Manhattan-area cabaret-club engagements launched her early-career American club-singing public profile.

Her 1979 Chrysalis Records signing under producer Mike Chapman — and her subsequent August 27, 1979 first commercial album In the Heat of the Night — launched her late-1970s and 1980s American rock-music public profile. The 1979 album produced her American rock-music public profile through the singles "Heartbreaker" (which peaked at number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100) and "We Live for Love."

Her 1980 second commercial album Crimes of Passion — released by Chrysalis Records — sold over four million American copies and produced her 1980s American rock-music commercial peak. The 1980 album produced the singles "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" (which won the 1981 Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, the first of her four consecutive Best Female Rock Vocal Performance Grammy Awards) and "You Better Run."

Her 1983 fourth commercial album Get Nervous won her the 1983 Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for the single "Shadows of the Night." Her subsequent commercial career has produced multiple American rock-music albums across the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. She married American guitarist Neil Giraldo in 1982 (her lifelong music-collaboration partner since 1979), and the couple has two daughters.

Her name Pat began as the unisex English diminutive of Patricia (from the Latin Patricia meaning "of the patrician class"). Pat has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' and unisex names since 1880.