Julio Iglesias Puga (25 July 1915 – 19 December 2005) was a Spanish

gynecologist Gynaecology or gynecology (see spelling differences) is the area of medicine that involves the treatment of women's diseases, especially those of the reproductive organs. It is often paired with the field of obstetrics, forming the combined area ...

. He was the father of singer

Julio Iglesias Julio José Iglesias de la Cueva (; born 23 September 1943) is a Spanish singer, songwriter and former professional footballer. Iglesias is recognized as the most commercially successful Spanish singer in the world and one of the top record ...

and grandfather to the singers

Enrique Iglesias Enrique Miguel Iglesias Preysler (; (born 8 May 1975) is a Spanish singer and songwriter. He started his recording career in the mid-1990s on the Mexican indie label Fonovisa and became the bestselling Spanish-language act of the decade. By the ...

and

Julio Iglesias Jr. Julio José Iglesias Preysler (born 25 February 1973) is a Spanish singer. In 2008, he was declared the winner of the CMT competition '' Gone Country''. Early life He was born Julio José Iglesias-Preysler (before a later name change) in Madri ...

and socialite

Chabeli Iglesias María Isabel "Chábeli" Iglesias Preysler (born 3 September 1971) is a Spanish journalist and socialite. She is the daughter of Spanish singer Julio Iglesias and Filipina socialite Isabel Preysler, and the older sister of singers Julio Iglesia ...

. He was nicknamed ''Papuchi'', "Daddy". He helped to found the Madrid Maternity Clinic and became the head of its sterility, infertility and family planning unit.

Life and career

Iglesias was born in

Ourense Ourense (; es, Orense ) is a city and capital of the province of Ourense, located in the Autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Galicia (Spain), Galicia, northwestern Spain. It is on the Camino Sanabrés path of the Way of St ...

. During the

Spanish Civil War The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, lin ...

, Iglesias fought for the Nationalists led by General Franco. In 1943, he married María del Rosario de la Cueva y Perignat and the couple had two sons

and Carlos. They divorced in 1983. In December 1981 he was kidnapped by Basque separatist organisation

ETA Eta (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἦτα ''ē̂ta'' or ell, ήτα ''ita'' ) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the close front unrounded vowel . Originally denoting the voiceless glottal fricative in most dialects, ...

and held for two weeks, eventually being rescued by a police anti-terrorism unit. He became a fixture of gossip magazines, always ready to chat with journalists revealing information about his famous descendants. Such magazines always referred to him by his title and surnames, ''Doctor Iglesias Puga'', to distinguish him from his son and grandson. In the early 1990s, he met US citizen Ronna Keith. The couple married in 2001 in a secret ceremony witnessed by close family and photographers from a magazine. On May 18, 2004, Keith gave birth to a boy, Jaime Iglesias, when Julio Sr. was 88 and Ronna was 40. Jaime's half-brother,

Julio Julio is the Spanish equivalent of the month July and may refer to: *Julio (given name) *Julio (surname) *Júlio de Castilhos, a municipality of the western part of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil * ''Julio'' (album), a 1983 compilation albu ...

, was 60 years old at the time. Jaime's nephews were 31-year-old Julio Jr. and 29-year-old

Enrique Enrique () is the Spanish language, Spanish variant of the given name Heinrich (given name), Heinrich of Germanic origin. Equivalents in other languages are Henry (given name), Henry (English), Enric (Catalan), Enrico (Italian), Henrik (Swedish, D ...

, and his niece was 32-year-old Chabeli. After Jaime was born in 2004, Iglesias rejected suggestions that Ronna was the driving force behind their decision to start a family. "At my age, a child is marvellous... I felt just like

Abraham Abraham, ; ar, , , name=, group= (originally Abram) is the common Hebrew patriarch of the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Judaism, he is the founding father of the special relationship between the Jew ...

," he declared. "If people say I just did it for my wife, I don't take it as an insult, but the truth is I wanted to do it just as much as she did... My wife wanted to do it and we did it... It was an act of generosity towards her. I leave her part of my blood, of my life. I need her so much that I said to her, 'Here, this is what you wanted for when I am gone.'" Shortly after announcing the arrival of her first baby, Ronna underwent

fertility treatment Assisted reproductive technology (ART) includes medical procedures used primarily to address infertility. This subject involves procedures such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), cryopreservation of gametes ...

in order to conceive again. IVF treatment is speculated to have been used for their second child. Iglesias died in

Madrid Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union (EU), and ...

the morning of December 19, 2005, at the age of 90. Ruth Iglesias, his fourth child, was born on July 26, 2006, 7 months after her father died.

References

External links

Obituary
in ''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...

'', 20 December 2005 {{DEFAULTSORT:Iglesias, Julio Sr. 1915 births 1980s missing person cases 2005 deaths 20th-century Spanish physicians 21st-century Spanish physicians Formerly missing people Julio Sr. Missing person cases in Spain Kidnapped Spanish people People from Ourense Spanish gynaecologists

Life and career

See also

References

External links