Julio José Iglesias de la Cueva (born September 23, 1943 in Madrid) is the best-selling Spanish singer of all time, having sold over 250 million records in different languages and released 77 records. While Iglesias rose to international prominence in the 1970s and 1980s as a performer of romantic ballads and as an iconically suave Latin gentleman, his success has continued as he crossed musical and linguistic barriers. Thus far, he has performed approximately 5,000 concerts and recorded albums in fourteen different languages.

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. I lost control of the car and rolled it, resulting in what they call paraparexia, which is not a paraplegic. 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. But slowly, he started to recover. And to increase dexterity in his hands, he began to play the guitar. 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.

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