Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson walked the Pre-Grammy GALA red carpet after 34 years of marriage, arriving together even as Wilson publicly revisited the family history she uncovered only years ago. The 69-year-old actor and singer has been talking about the hidden story of her father’s life in Bulgaria, a tale she said her family never heard from him while he was alive.
Wilson said on the podcast How to Fail with Elizabeth Day that her father had a wife and child in Bulgaria before he met her mother, and that the genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are followed his story because it was so unusual and shocking. She said the show took her to Bulgaria and that the truth emerged after a visit to the Hall of Records.
What she found was brutal. Wilson said her father’s first wife, Alice, gave birth on Dec. 26 and died three days later from complications in delivery. Their son, Emil, lived for four months and later died from an infection after the war. Wilson said she and her sister each later gave birth to one of their own children on Dec. 26, a detail that has kept the family story close to her.
Wilson said her father never told her or other relatives about that earlier life, and she has described still struggling with that silence. In October 2022, she discussed the same secret on The BobbyCast podcast, saying her father tried to escape Bulgaria after the deaths of his wife and son. She said he was caught, sent to a labor camp, escaped with a fellow inmate after tricking a guard on the night shift, and eventually made his way to Turkey.
From there, Wilson said, he found work on a freighter shoveling coal and made his way to Philadelphia before jumping ship. She said he took Richard with him as a stowaway because there was no work for Richard. Wilson said her father died in 2009 at 89, leaving behind a history he had kept private for decades. The family’s story now sits in public view, not because it was meant to, but because a genealogy show and Wilson’s own telling pulled it into the open.
