Rita Wilson was surprised to learn that her late father, Allan Wilson, had a second life away from her family.
“I did this English show, Who Do You Think You Are?, and usually in those genealogy shows, they go back many, many generations,” Rita, 69, said on the Wednesday, April 22, episode of the “How to Fail” podcast. “What they found with my dad was that his story was so shocking and unusual that they stuck with his story.”
On the show, Rita traveled to Bulgaria, where she discovered old records that listed Allan as married before he immigrated to the United States.
“He was married and he had a child. I said, ‘Am I going to meet someone? Am I going to meet a family?’” Rita said. “It was a little boy. And they’re like, ‘No.’”
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According to Rita, Allan had been married to a woman named Alice who died three days after giving birth to a son, Emil. The infant died four months later.
“They were so poor. It was right after the war [in] Bulgaria. I don’t know how they would have afforded formula or something, but I’m sure they made ways,” she said. “I mean, he didn’t die
from starvation; he died from an infection.”
Allan later married Dorothy Wilson, with whom he shared Rita and siblings Chris and Lily Wilson.
“He never said anything to us. I wish I could have talked to him about that,” Rita said. “They kept things so private.”
While Rita never knew the truth about her father’s past before his death, she had always known that he was a great parent.
“My parents were uneducated, but they were incredibly smart and incredibly intuitive and very hardworking [and had] incredible values,” Rita said. “My dad was a bartender, and we grew up in the Hollywood Hills, and everybody around me in my school were all, I would say, upper-middle class.”
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At one point in her adolescence, Rita dated a boy from a “very wealthy family” whose friends were equally affluent.
“I was getting to know all of these people, and I had never been exposed to that sort of lifestyle or anything,” she recalled. “We were having dinner in Laguna Beach … and there was another couple there. We were on a double date, and we’re all, like, 23 or something like that, and this young woman said to me, ‘What does your dad do for a living?’”
Rita understood that the woman was “really wealthy” and inherited her own father’s business.
“I said, ‘Oh, my dad’s a bartender,’ and she goes, ‘Why do you say it like that?’” the actress said. “I said, ‘I don’t know, you guys all have businesses and your families are all different than mine. You’re very wealthy.’”
Rita’s friend’s father, however, had died years before their double date.
“She said, ‘I would give up everything that I have to have my father back here with me.’ It really changed instantly in a minute,” Rita said. “He was an extraordinary man. He escaped communist Bulgaria. He escaped a labor camp. He got on a freighter ship to get a job so he could come to America. He jumped ship when he got to America.”
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She continued, “He got a job as a barback in New York and worked his way up to being a bartender, and 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.”
As soon as Rita realized how privileged she was to have doting parents, she found “everything changed in that moment.”
“I looked at him in a completely different way,” she said. “The realization that he could be gone? She was saying, ‘My dad died young, and yes, I have this business and I have a fancy car and a fancy house, but I don’t have my dad. I’d rather have my dad.’”
