Update Post: November 28, 2023 10:57 am
The legendary singer celebrates his 80th birthday
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
Julio Iglesias is the most popular Spanish singer in the world. I would like to write that he celebrates his 80th birthday like a living legend, but he already celebrated his 70th birthday, his 60th birthday, and his 50th birthday. Grammy winner, owner of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the most popular non-Chinese artist in China (official title given to him 10 years ago), the most popular Latin artist in the world, the person who has sold the most records in the world in a large number of languages (that is, fourteen; all of these are also official titles; overall, 250 or 300 million records have been sold), laureate of the French Legion of Honor and the Spanish Gold Medal for merits in the fine arts… Wherever you spit, Julio Iglesias achieved everything that a European singer could achieve in the 20th century.
And just think that initially he had no intention of becoming a singer. In his youth he played soccer and studied law. And with football he was even more serious than with his studies: he became a goalkeeper for Real Madrid Castilla (Real Madrid’s subsidiary team). But all his dreams were dashed when he was 20 years old: he suffered a serious car accident and couldn’t walk for two years. It was in the hospital where he first picked up a guitar to regain mobility in his hands. And it was there that he realized that his true calling was music…
But even here he didn’t start singing right away. At first she simply composed melodies and one day I arrived at the record company with the sheet music. I hoped the song would be sung by someone the company already had a contract with. She sang something on a guitar and they asked her, “Why don’t you perform it yourself?” “I’m not a singer,” Julio began to excuse himself. But they put it into circulation and sent it to a music competition in Benidorm, which, to his own astonishment, he won. An album with the simple title “I Sing” was soon released. It turned out to be a great success and in 1970 Julio represented Spain at Eurovision (he took fourth place).
This is where his talent as a polyglot came in handy: he started recording in French, English, Italian, German, Portuguese… (he later learned to sing in Indonesian, Japanese and Russian). And in each of the respective countries he was received as if he were their own: millions of records were sold in the United Kingdom, Germany and France. He enjoyed enormous popularity in the United States (suffice it to say that September 8 in Miami is officially celebrated as Julio Iglesias Day; by the way, he lived in Miami for many years).
Regarding his personal life, it is usually written that Iglesias had more than 3,000 wives. He himself joked that this is “data only up to 1976.” (It’s hard not to remember here another heartthrob, Hollywood actor Warren Beatty: when asked if he really had 13,000 members, he replied: “Yes, it was a busy month!”). However, Iglesias once seriously answered this question: “It’s true that I tried to live my life to the fullest, but 3,000 women… However, when this rumor started to spread, I told my manager: “Don’t even think It happens to deny it!
One way or another, in 1971 Iglesias married Isabel Preysler, a Spanish woman born in Manila and who moved to Madrid when she was 16 years old. She tried her hand at journalism and Julio became the first person she interviewed. (According to another version, they met at a party – Julio was impressed by the girl’s beauty, asked her owners what her name was and went to meet her, even though at that time he had a girlfriend in London ). He invited Isabel to a concert by the singer Juan Pardo, she agreed… Soon Iglesias admitted to his friend and manager that Isabel was the woman of his life (“I already know several women in your life,” he responded). And then Isabel became pregnant. Being a deeply religious person, she did not have an abortion, and seven months after they met, she and Julio went to church and the bride sobbed during the wedding sacrament.
Three children were born from this marriage, among them the now famous singer Enrique Iglesias. In 1979, Julio and Isabel divorced because she was tired of a woman’s voice answering every time she looked for her husband and called him. And in 1982, Isabel sent all the children to Miami to live there with her father (otherwise they were threatened with kidnapping for ransom in Spain).
Julio had even more children from his second wife, Dutch model Miranda Rijnsburger, who is 22 years his junior: five! And they were all born in an unofficial marriage that lasted many years; It was not until 2010 that Iglesias and Miranda formalized their relationship.
There was a scandal with another ninth child. Portuguese dancer María Edite Santos announced in 1992 that her 17-year-old son, Javier Sánchez, was the father of Iglesias, supposedly the result of a brief romance that took place in 1975. For years, Santos and Sánchez worked to have Julio recognize the child. He vehemently denied his paternity and refused to take a DNA test, even though the case had already gone to trial. In the end, a whole farce began: the plaintiffs extracted DNA from a water bottle that Iglesias’s son, Julio Jr., left on the beach: it turned out that they were half-brothers! The judge refused to accept such evidence, but ruled that Javier is Iglesias’ son because they are “very similar.” Julio, completely enraged, filed an appeal and the Supreme Court of Spain ruled that he and Sánchez were not related…