Rita Wilson Reveals Father's Tragic Bulgarian Past

Rita Wilson, the 69-year-old actress known for roles in films like Sleepless in Seattle, recently shared a deeply personal family secret on the How I Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast. She discovered during a 2012 episode of the genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? that her late father, Hassan Halilov Ibrahimoff, had a previous wife and child in Bulgaria before immigrating to the United States.

Wilson, who grew up in Los Angeles with her parents and siblings, explained that the show's researchers focused entirely on her father's story due to its unusual nature. Born in Greece and later moving to Bulgaria, Ibrahimoff, who went by Allan Wilson in the U.S., had married Alice there. She gave birth to their son, Emil, on December 26 shortly after World War II, but died three days later from delivery complications. The infant survived only four months, succumbing to an infection amid postwar hardships.

The revelation came as a shock to Wilson, who learned of it after her father's death in 2009 at age 89. "We go to the place and we look at this book of records," she recalled on the podcast, describing the moment in Bulgaria's Hall of Records. Upon hearing about the marriage and...