
Pat Benatar (10 January 1953-), born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski, is an American rock singer-songwriter. Born in Brooklyn, New York City to a Polish-American sheet metal worker and his wife, a beautician, she was raised in Lindenhurst on Long Island, and she dropped out of college to marry her high school sweetheart, Dennis Benatar, whose US Army service led to Andrzejewski moving with him to Richmond, Virginia, where she worked as a bank teller. She became a local musician in Richmond before the family moved back to New York in 1975, and, while she and her husband divorced in 1977, she kept his surname and released her first album, In the Heat of the Night, in 1979; this album included her hit single "Heartbreaker". During the 1980s, she scored many successful hits, among them her best-known song, "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" (1980), as well as "Shadows of the Night" (1982), and "We Belong" (1984). She released four more albums between 1991 and 2003.
Benatar was a lapsed Roman Catholic, and she identified as a feminist throughout her life. In 2017, she released a new song, "Shine", in support of the Women's March (an pro-women and anti-Donald Trump protest), and Gloria Steinem favorably compared her to Emma Goldman and Fannie Lou Hamer for knowing that "there's no revolution without music".