The international superstar, 65, continues to sing all over the world. Last spring, he took ill and had to cancel some American concerts. “I was very unhappy for that,” he says. “I love the United States. I will be back in 2009 and plan to spend the year there.” Iglesias became a singer when an automobile accident nearly took his life as a teenager and stripped him of his promising sports career. “I came back from something that you normally stay in a wheelchair from. I do not take this for granted,” he says. Iglesias has two generations of families—three older children (including Julio Jr. and Enrique, both singers) by his first wife, and five younger children by his second. He has homes in the Dominican Republic, Spain and Miami.
Q Please help solve a disagreement between my husband and me—a lobster dinner awaits your answer! I say that the Brooke Burke from Dancing with the Stars is the same Brooke Burke who hosted the game show Dog Eat Dog a few years back. My husband says it is a different Brooke Burke. Who is right, and what more can you tell me about Brooke Burke?
—Robin Bauer, Spring City, Tenn.
It’s two different Brookes: Burns was the host of Dog Eat Dog, and Burke won last season’s Dancing with the Stars. Burns, 30, broke her neck in 2006 in a swimming-pool mishap but recovered to star in the Hallmark Channel’s holiday movie The Most Wonderful Time of the Year and ABC’s short-lived series Miss Guided. Burke, 37, hosted the CBS series Rock Star and E!’s Wild On. The mother of four and former Playboy model was born in Hartford, Conn., and raised in Tucson, Ariz.
Q Marlo Thomas did a remake of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. Is it available on video?
—Mrs. Charlie Ellsworth, Show Low, Ariz.
The 1977 made-for-TV movie It Happened One Christmas was, indeed, a remake of the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life, with Marlo Thomas playing the “regendered” Jimmy Stewart role as a frazzled, suicidal banker who has to be shown how the world would have been different without her. The movie never was released on video, but it does exist on DVD.
Q My son and I remember a TV show called Movin’ On about two truckers. One of the actors was Claude Akins, but we can’t remember the other one. And did Merle Haggard sing the theme song?
—Mary Ellen Harkins, New Kensington, Pa.
Frank Converse hit the highway alongside his truck-driving co-star, Claude Akins, in Movin’ On, which aired for two seasons before running into a roadblock—cancellation—in 1976. And, yes, Merle Haggard wrote and sang the show’s theme song, which became a No. 1 country hit for him in 1975.