Patrick Duffy est un acteur, réalisateur et scénariste américain, né le 17 mars 1949 à Townsend dans le Montana.

Parmi les rôles les plus marquants qu'il a interprétés, celui de Bobby Ewing dans le feuilleton télévisé Dallas, celui de l'homme-poisson dans la série L'Homme de l'Atlantide (The Man From Atlantis) et celui du papa-poule dans Notre belle famille (Step By Step).

Biographie

Duffy married Carlyn Rosser, ten years his senior, in a Nichiren Buddhist ceremony on February 15, 1974. They live near Eagle Point, Oregon, with their sons Padraic Terence Duffy (b. 1974) and Conor Frederick Duffy (b. 1979). They also have four grandchildren. Duffy was an avid collector of antique dolls and children's books. He converted to Nichiren Buddhism, and began chanting Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō at the approximate time of his earliest encounters with his wife, who was then a ballet dancer with the First Chamber Dance Company of New York. He and his family are long-time active members of the Japanese Nichiren Buddhist lay organization SGI & are members of SGI-USA (Sōka Gakkai International – USA).

On November 18, 1986, Duffy's parents were murdered by two young men, Kenneth Miller and Sean Wentz, during an armed robbery of the Boulder, Montana, bar his parents owned. Wentz and Miller, who were teenagers at the time, were convicted of the murders and sentenced to 75 years in prison. In 2001, Miller appeared before the Montana Parole board after Sean Wentz recanted his original story, admitting that he was the sole gunman. Miller was denied clemency in 2001 but was released on parole in December 2007.

Duffy's nephew is Major League Baseball pitcher Barry Zito.

According to longtime fan and future crewmember, Andrea Cantrell, she was asked to create a photo album of the Ewing Family, in 2012, who was having difficulty finding as many appropriate pictures as she could, though many of the new cast members could only provide recent snaps, and her efforts were further hampered because the image of two original Dallas stars, late actors Jim Davis and Barbara Bel Geddes, are controlled by the handlers of their estate. Then, after struggling, Duffy came to the rescue, who asked his wife to send a box of pictures to Cantrell. All the pictures Duffy's real-life family were taken, decades ago (before Duffy's parents were murdered, in real-life), as well as a baby picture of Patrick, himself. His real-life mother also bore a slight resemblance to his acting mentor, Bel Geddes, whose character made a photo of her holding baby Patrick, exactly what Cantrell needed. His real-life late parents made a cameo on the revised Dallas series.