SPANISH LIES?
Alec Baldwin’s US wife ‘pretended to be Majorcan’
SHE is a top podcaster, yoga guru and wife of a leading Hollywood star.
But US-born Hilaria Baldwin, 36, has been forced to deny claims t hat she has been bizarrely pretending to be Spanish for the past ten years.
The second wife of Mission Impossible star Alec Baldwin, 62, has faced criticism over her accent – which appears to swing from American to Spanish – amid claims she apparently could not remember the English word for ‘cucumber’.
Several former classmates at her US private school insisted that she possessed no hint of a foreign accent at that point in life.
Ms Baldwin released a sevenminute video on Instagram on Sunday, saying her name was originally Hillary and she was born and raised in Boston – rather than Majorca as claimed on her agent’s website.
The mother-of-five added: ‘Yes, I am a white girl. I am a white girl.’
She said she considers herself to have ‘two cultures’ and stressed that her parents and brother now live in Majorca.
Ms Baldwin insisted she is ‘a mix of many, many, many things’ and denied that she had misled anyone about her ethnicity. She said: ‘I’m born in Boston and then I spent some of my childhood in Boston, some of my childhood in Spain.
‘My family, my brother, my parents, my nephew – everybody is over there in Spain now. I’m here.
‘There was a lot of back and forth my entire life but I’m really lucky that I grew up speaking two languages and I’m trying to raise my kids so that they speak two languages too.’ It appeared last night that both her parents were born and raised in the US but had a strong interest in Spanish culture.
Ms Baldwin said she is raising her children to be bilingual like her and sees no harm in embracing two cultures. Her husband, previously married to Hollywood actress Kim Basinger, 67, leapt to her defence last night, blasting Twitter – where criticism of his wife began. A video of Baldwin on a chat show in 2013 earlier emerged in which he impersonated his wife’s ‘Spanish’ accent and said: ‘My wife is from Spain.’
Ms Baldwin said she sometimes has an unusual accent as she tends to ‘mix’ Spanish and English.
She added: ‘I am that person that if I’ve been speaking a lot of Spanish I tend to mix them and if I’m speaking more English, or a lot of English, then I mix that. It’s one of those things I’ve always been a little insecure about at times.’
She said that she had grown up being called both Hilaria and Hillary and a few years before she met Baldwin she had decided to ‘consolidate the two’ for ease.
She said: ‘They want to say that I said that my mother is Spanish and my family – they all live there and they all speak Spanish and English. But I’ve never said that my mother was Spanish. My family’s a big mix of so many different things and also it’s something we’re super, super proud of because it’s amazing to be a big mix of things.’
Ms Baldwin, who has been married to the actor since 2012, had the maiden name Hayward-Thomas. Her father was a lawyer with a degree in Spanish literature while her mother was a Harvard medicine professor. She said she refuses to ‘apologise’ for her upbringing.
She stressed: ‘This is not someone trying to pretend to be something else – it’s literally just you have two cultures. You don’t have to go into deep family history of trying to figure it out – that’s my life experience – I don’t have to apologise for my life experience, OK?’
Her stepdaughter, model Ireland Baldwin, 25, dismissed the critics, saying: ‘It’s so pathetic anyone would want to play detective, and dig that deep into someone’s life that they don’t know – don’t know anything about – how they were raised, who they were actually raised by.’
‘My family’s a mix of many things’