Julio Iglesias fans, prepare for a page-turner…
A new biography about the 75-year-old Spanish singer/songwriter chronicles the story of his long career, his relationship with fame, and his legend as the quintessential Latin lover— it was once reported that he had slept with 3,000 women, a figure, according to the book, that he privately told his manager not to deny.
Julio. La Biografía, will be published on Thursday (Sept. 19), in Spanish, by Penguin Random House imprint Aguilar. The book’s author, Óscar García Blesa, a journalist and long-time music industry executive, previously wrote the authorized biography of Alejandro Sanz, which was a bestseller in Spain. García is currently director of Mow Management, the agency that also manages Sanz.
While the Iglesias book was not penned as an official biography, it is one that, in the publisher’s words, was written “with respect and rigor.”
“My admiration for Julio, his artistic achievements and his kaleidoscopic personality have been the fundamental reasons that drove me to write the book,” García writes in the introduction to Julio. La Biografá.
Published to coincide with the 50-year anniversary of Iglesias’ first album, Yo Canto, the 800-page book covers the crooner’s superstar achievements: his 350 million records sold throughout the world, his place among the five best-selling artists of all time and Spain’s internationally best-known artist of all time.
The book probes Iglesias’ feeling about success, and professes his insecurities with the ladies. “When I go out with a woman, when I have her in my mind, however beautiful the woman is and however romantic the evening” García quotes Iglesias as once saying, “I always ask myself, is she with me because of who I am or what I represent? That has made me doubt a lot and suffer quite a bit.”
The bio also delves into Iglesias’ marriage to Isabel Preysler, constant fodder for gossip magazines until she ended the union in 1979, as well as his relationship with his son and fellow singing star Enrique Iglesias, who began his career under an assumed name to escape the shadow of his father.
García, who first met Iglesias in Miami recording studio Criteria in 2001, says that his intention was to offer “a new look at the man and the character, someone who everyone in the world knows, but who, like any human being, has dirt that has not been dished.” The book, says García, is also “a sociocultural chronicle of an entire country [Spain] over more than seventy years.”
