Rita Wilson never knew her father had another family before he immigrated to the United States—until after his death. The revelation came during her 2012 appearance on the genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, which was supposed to trace her family history but instead focused entirely on her father, Hassan Halilov Ibrahimoff.
"We went to Bulgaria," Wilson recalled on the April 22 episode of the How to Fall With Elizabeth Day podcast. "We go to the place and we look at this book of records and it says, 'This is where your dad was living and names.' And they said, 'Well, your dad was married.' I said, 'What?'"
Wilson learned that her father had a wife named Alice and a son named Emile, both of whom had died before he moved to the U.S. Alice died from birth complications three days after giving birth to Emile on December 26, and the infant died of an infection months later.
"But this is where it gets weird," Wilson continued. "My sister's firstborn child was born on December 26th, and my youngest son was born on December 26th. And I think of my dad all of those years celebrating all those birthdays and knowing that he had a child born on December 26th, Emile, who passed away. I still can't get over that."
Wilson said her father never spoke about his past. "He never said anything to us," she shared. "I wish I could have talked to him about that."
Reflecting on her father's silence, Wilson attributed it to a cultural norm of privacy, noting that there is no word for personal privacy in Greek. "I think in my own generation, as we talk about public versus private, I think this privacy thing was something I grew up with. I was like, 'Don't ever talk about anything anytime, anywhere because you don't know what's going to happen. It's going to backfire on you.'"
Despite the secrecy, Wilson expressed profound gratitude for her father's sacrifices. "He got a job as a barback in New York and worked his way up to being a bartender," she said. "He supported a family. He bought a house. He never had debt in his life. He and my mom were married for 59 years. And they were an incredible couple and incredible parents."
Wilson, who shares sons Chet and Truman with husband Tom Hanks, now sees her father's hidden history as a testament to his strength. "I was 23 years old, but still old enough to know better and to really value what he had accomplished and what he had sacrificed in order to have a life of freedom in America and to escape from communism," she said. "And he was such an incredible person."