Enrique Iglesias Reveals How He Reconciled With His Father Julio Iglesias

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Always very protective of his private life, Enrique Iglesias is one of the stars that is least lavished in the media and avoids talking about what happens to him offstage with the same constancy with which he covers his head with a baseball cap.

That is why he was surprised by the frankness with which he approached one of the most sensitive personal matters in a recent conversation with the Spanish newspaper El País and that he refused to mention in any interview: his complicated relationship with his father, the mythical Julio Iglesias, who has never been close and it has fueled all kinds of rumors about envy, rivalry and confrontation.

The Spanish singer told the newspaper that one night a few weeks ago at his home in Miami, when his twins were already asleep, he poured himself a vodka with ice and started to watch a movie that moved something inside him. He didn't remember the title of the feature film, but it did drive him to do something he hadn't done in a long time, call his father.

“He immediately picked up the phone. We had a very nice conversation. I was in good spirits. It was one of those conversations in which you are aware that it is special. It comforted me a lot,”Iglesias said in the interview published last weekend by the newspaper, in which he made it clear that in order to carry out his musical career he had to sacrifice his relationship with his father.

"At 18 years old I separated from my family completely," he said. “I left and for ten years I had absolutely no contact with my father. I did not begin to have contact with him until my grandfather [ Julio Iglesias Puga, in 2005] passed away. Many years. I suffered a lot. But what I felt for the music gave me strength. And above all, I was trying to do it my way.”

It was precisely the traumatic kidnapping of his grandfather in 1981 that led Enrique and his brothers Chabeli and Julio José to move from Madrid to Miami to live with their father, who had separated a few years before his mother, Isabel Preysler.

But who gave him the impetus and a few hundred dollars to start his career was the person who raised him from a young age, the nanny they called La Seño, Elvira Olivares, and to whom he dedicated the album with which he rose to fame in 1995, far from the shadow of his father.

“I cried a lot in the beginning. There was a particular moment. I went to San Francisco to mix my first album. I was there for a month,”he said. "I remember going back to the hotel, being there alone and crying and thinking, 'What am I doing: I have completely lost touch with my family.' Because it affected everything. Especially with my father, but also with the rest of the family, "he added.

Iglesias, who acknowledges that fatherhood has made him reflect a lot and look at life from another angle, stressed that "more now than twenty-five years ago" they have greater mutual respect for their parents. "He is my father and I love him with all my soul."