That year he also recorded duets with Diana Ross and Willie Nelson. This prompted Julio (divorced from Preysler), to move his family to Miami, Florida, where they settled in a mansion on Miami Beach. In 1985, his father was kidnapped but found well and alive after two agonizing weeks. The album also featured "All of You", a hit duet with Diana Ross. The album sold three million albums in the US alone, with the first single " To All The Girls I've Loved Before", a duet with Willie Nelson, reaching the top five on the Billboard Hot 100. In 1984, he released the smash hit album 1100 Bel Air Place, which gave him considerable fame in English-language markets. He also released a collection, Julio, in 1983 building his reputation. Iglesias released the album De Niña a Mujer in 1981, from which he had his first hit in the English market with a Spanish cover of " Begin the Beguine" (a No.1 hit in the United Kingdom). In 1978, he signed a contract for CBS International, adding English, French, Portuguese, German and Italian to his language repertoire. Notable albums from this decade include A Flor de Piel (1974, which spawned the big European hit Manuela), El Amor (1975) and Soy (1978). His entry was the song "Gwendolyne" which was his first recording. He represented Spain at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970, finishing fourth behind Northern Irish singer Dana Scallon, and the Welsh singer Mary Hopkin. In 1968, he won the Benidorm International Song Festival, a songwriter's contest in Spain, and signed a contract with a Columbia Records Latin music label, Discos Columbia. Once he recovered, he resumed his studies and he travelled to England to study English, first in Ramsgate and then at Bell Educational Trust's Language School in Cambridge. And to increase dexterity in his hands, he began to play the guitar.
It's a compression in the cord, in the sense of the neck… my spinal cord, and I was very, very ill for three years." Doctors thought the young man would never walk again. "I lost control of the car and rolled it, resulting in what they call paraparexia, which is not a paraplegic. If not for a car accident, on 22nd September 1963, he may have never had a music career: "I had a car accident, very, very strange car accident," remembers Iglesias. In 1963, his career as a football athlete was cut short after a car accident. While attending law school in Madrid in the early sixties, he was, for a short period, a goalkeeper for one of Real Madrid's youth soccer teams. Julio's half-siblings were born from the second marriage of Dr.
Half brother Jaime was born, and half-sister Ruth on 26 July 2006. When Iglesias himself was 61, his 87-year-old father had more children.
Julio Iglesias Puga from Galicia and Maria del Rosario de la Cueva y Perignat.