The story of Celine Dion

From Charlemagne to Quebec star

Céline Marie Claudette Dion was born on the thirtieth of March 1968 in Charlemagne, a small French speaking town near Montreal, the fourteenth and last child of Adhémar Dion, a butcher, and his wife Thérèse. Money was short. Céline later said her mother put a pillow in a drawer so the new baby had somewhere to sleep. She was named after Céline, a song Hugues Aufray had recorded two years earlier. Everybody in the house played or sang. She first sang in public at five, at her brother Michel's wedding, then for customers at her parents' small piano bar, Le Vieux Baril. School was harder. Other children bullied her and called her Vampire because of her teeth and skinny frame.[1] [2] [3]

At twelve, Céline wrote her first song with her mother Thérèse and her brother Jacques. It was called Ce n'était qu'un rêve, which means it was only a dream. A demo reached a Montreal manager named René Angélil. At that moment Angélil was close to giving up. The singer Ginette Reno had dropped him as her manager in 1980, and he was thinking about going back to university to study law. When Céline came to his office with her mother, she had no microphone, so he handed her a pen to sing into. By the end of the song he was in tears. He later compared her to a royal flush, the unbeatable hand in poker.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Angélil could not find anyone to pay for a record, so he mortgaged his own house and started a label. Her debut album, La voix du bon Dieu, meaning the voice of the good Lord, came out in Quebec on the sixth of November 1981, produced by Angélil, the French lyricist Eddy Marnay and Daniel Hétu. It sold more than a hundred thousand copies in the province. That June she had made her first television appearance, aged thirteen, on the talk show of Michel Jasmin. When he asked her about her ultimate ambition, she could barely answer. Years later she laughed that she simply had not understood the question. Angélil's gamble was risky. He fell behind on his mortgage in 1981 and declared bankruptcy in 1983.[1] [2] [3]

Her reach spread quickly. In the autumn of 1982 she flew to Tokyo for the Yamaha World Popular Song Festival and won the prize for outstanding song with Tellement j'ai d'amour pour toi. Its follow up, D'amour ou d'amitié, reached the top five in France, making her the first Canadian artist to earn a gold record there. At the 1983 Félix Awards, Quebec's music prizes, the young teenager won four trophies in one night. On the eleventh of September 1984 she sang for Pope John Paul the Second before sixty thousand people at Montreal's Olympic Stadium. Behind the scenes Angélil pushed out her first agent, Paul Lévesque, who later sued him, and Angélil's second marriage, to the singer Anne Renée, ended.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1986, when she was eighteen, Céline and Angélil decided it was time to turn a teen star into an adult one. She disappeared from public view for many months. Her teeth were capped, her hair was cut and permed and her clothes became glossier. She took voice and dance lessons, and Angélil enrolled her at the Berlitz language school to perfect her English. She had told him she wanted to be a star like Michael Jackson after seeing him perform, and Jackson was a big reason she wanted to learn the language. In April 1987 she returned with Incognito, her first album on a major label, CBS. It gave her four number one hits in Quebec and went double platinum in Canada.[1] [2] [3]

Eurovision and the English breakthrough

Her ticket to the wider world came from an unlikely country. Céline represented Switzerland at the Eurovision Song Contest, held in Dublin on the thirtieth of April 1988, with Ne partez pas sans moi, which means don't leave without me. It was written by the Turkish composer Atilla Şereftuğ and the Swiss lyricist Nella Martinetti. She sang ninth on the night. The voting went down to the wire, and she won with a hundred and thirty seven points, just one point ahead of the British entry, Go, sung by Scott Fitzgerald. It is still one of the closest finishes in the contest's history, and as of 2026 it remains the last winning song sung in French.[1] [2] [3]

That night in Dublin changed her private life too. The couple later said their romance began on the night she won Eurovision, when Céline told Angélil she loved him. She was twenty and he was forty six. He asked her to keep it secret, just as he had once hidden his own first marriage from fans. Her mother, who travelled everywhere with her, was against it at first because of the age gap and his two failed marriages. In her autobiography Céline wrote that she had kept his photo under her pillow so her mother, who shared her room, would not find it. For five years only family and close friends knew.[1] [2] [3]

In 1989 her voice gave out during a concert on the Incognito tour. She went to see a throat specialist, William Gould, who gave her a stark choice: have surgery on her vocal cords straight away, or stop using her voice completely for three weeks. She chose silence, then retrained her voice with the teacher William Riley. In May 1989 she opened the next Eurovision in Lausanne, where she also first performed Where Does My Heart Beat Now. It became the lead single of Unison, her first English album, released in April 1990 with producers including David Foster. The song climbed to number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1991, the first top ten hit there by a French Canadian artist.[1] [2] [3]

Success in English brought grumbling at home. Some Quebec fans felt she was abandoning them, and when the Félix Awards named her anglophone artist of the year, she turned the award down, saying she was not an anglophone artist and was proud to be Québécoise. Then came a disappointment. She had been lined up to sing the theme for the cartoon An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, but lost the job, and the producers went back to Linda Ronstadt. Months later Disney called. It wanted her for a pop version of the title song of Beauty and the Beast, but worried she was too unknown in America on her own, so it paired her with the established singer Peabo Bryson.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Beauty and the Beast became her first top ten hit in Britain and her second in America, and it won her a first Grammy. It led her 1992 self titled album, which went diamond in Canada and was promoted in the United States with a line telling people to remember the name because they would never forget the voice. At home she kept her French side alive with Dion chante Plamondon, songs by the lyricist Luc Plamondon. Its version of Un garçon pas comme les autres became a big hit in France. There was a scare in 1991 as well, when René Angélil suffered a heart attack at the age of forty nine.[1] [2] [3]

The colour of her love

In November 1993 Céline released The Colour of My Love, and inside the sleeve she finally told the world the secret. The album was dedicated to René, the colour of her love. She had feared fans would find a relationship with a man twenty six years older inappropriate, but they embraced it. The couple had become engaged on her twenty fifth birthday, the thirtieth of March 1993. Their wedding, on the seventeenth of December 1994 at Montreal's Notre Dame Basilica, was a lavish affair broadcast live on Canadian television, with hundreds of fans crowded outside. Céline called it the ceremony of her dreams.[1] [2] [3]

The album's lead single was a cover of The Power of Love, first a hit for Jennifer Rush in 1985. David Foster produced it, and in February 1994 it gave Céline her first number one in America, holding the top spot for four weeks. It was the biggest selling single by a woman in the United States that year. Britain fell for a different song. Think Twice, a rock tinged ballad with a big guitar solo, spent seven weeks at number one in 1995. For five straight weeks she held the top single and the top album at the same time, something the Official Charts Company said no act had done since the Beatles in 1965.[1] [2] [3]

Then came the record that made her a legend in France. In late 1994 she went into a Paris studio with the French singer and songwriter Jean-Jacques Goldman, who wrote and produced eleven of the twelve songs on D'eux. It was released in Canada on the thirtieth of March 1995, her twenty seventh birthday. Its first single, Pour que tu m'aimes encore, spent twelve weeks at number one in France, and the album itself spent forty four weeks on top of the French chart. D'eux became the best selling French language album ever made. Goldman went on to write and produce her next French album too, S'il suffisait d'aimer, which also went diamond in France.[1] [2] [3]

One song on D'eux carried real grief. Vole, which means fly, was dedicated to Céline's niece Karine, who had cystic fibrosis. Karine died from the disease at sixteen, in Céline's arms. Céline had supported the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation since 1982 and became its national celebrity patron in 1993, and she has kept fighting for the cause for decades since, raising money, singing at benefits and recording public service messages. The song crossed into English too. Vole became Fly on her next English album, alongside English versions of Pour que tu m'aimes encore and Je sais pas.[1] [2] [3]

Falling into You and the top of the world

Falling into You arrived on the eleventh of March 1996 and showed Céline at the height of her powers. Fourteen producers worked on it, bringing in orchestras, African chanting, Spanish guitar and saxophone. The lead single in North America, Because You Loved Me, was written by Diane Warren as a tribute to her father and used as the theme of the Robert Redford film Up Close and Personal. It spent six weeks at number one, knocking Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men's One Sweet Day off the top, and a record nineteen weeks on top of the adult contemporary chart. The album sold more than thirty two million copies worldwide, and more than twelve million in the United States alone.[1] [2] [3]

The album opened with its most theatrical track. It's All Coming Back to Me Now was written and produced by Jim Steinman, the man behind Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell. Steinman said he had been inspired by Wuthering Heights, and he wanted to write about obsessive love and dead things coming back to life. The song had first been recorded in 1989 by a little known girl group called Pandora's Box. Céline's version runs well over seven minutes, and its video, directed by Nigel Dick at a castle outside Prague, was said to be one of the most expensive ever made. The single reached number two in America and stayed there for five weeks.[1] [2] [3]

Another cover on the album became a vocal test that singers still attempt. Céline's version of Eric Carmen's All by Myself was produced by David Foster in the Bahamas. She later revealed that its famous high note, just before the key change, was never planned. Foster added it during the session. When she asked why, he told her that if she could not sing it, other singers would. She insisted on proving she could. In July 1996 she and Foster, at the piano, performed The Power of the Dream at the opening ceremony of the Atlanta Olympics, to a television audience of more than three billion people.[1] [2] [3]

At the Grammy Awards in February 1997, Falling into You won both best pop album and album of the year, the academy's top prize. A month later, at the Oscars on the twenty fourth of March, Céline became the first artist to perform twice on the same Academy Awards night. She sang Because You Loved Me, then stepped in at two days' notice for Natalie Cole on I Finally Found Someone, a song Barbra Streisand had recorded with Bryan Adams. Streisand, who had chosen not to perform, sent flowers and a note saying they should make a record together one day. That note led to the duet Tell Him.[1] [2]

Titanic and the song that would not sink

The biggest song of her life began as something nobody wanted. Titanic's director, James Cameron, did not want a pop song at the end of his film. Sony had paid eight hundred thousand dollars for the score album alone, with no song and no singer. But the composer James Horner quietly wrote a melody with lyricist Will Jennings. He played it for Céline and René on a piano in a suite at Caesars Palace. Horner was no singer, and Céline signalled that it was impossible. René stepped in and suggested she at least record a demo. She later said she wanted to choke her husband, because she had just done two big film songs and did not want another.[1] [2]

She recorded the demo in New York, in a bad mood and feeling unwell. She even drank black coffee with sugar, which she normally avoided on studio days because it sped up her vibrato. In the dimmed vocal booth, Sony boss Tommy Mottola said, she sang it straight through, and the people in the control room were in tears. Horner then carried a cassette of it around for weeks, waiting for Cameron to be in a good mood. When Cameron finally heard it, he agreed, and after a screening in New York he found Céline clutching a tissue shredded from crying. The song was released on the twenty fourth of November 1997.[1] [2]

My Heart Will Go On had a slow start over Christmas, but when the film opened, Mottola said, it was like throwing gasoline on a bonfire. It debuted at number one in America on the twenty eighth of February 1998, topped charts in more than twenty five countries and became the best selling single in the world that year. With over eighteen million copies sold, it is the second best selling single ever by a woman. It won the Oscar for best original song, and in 1999 it won four Grammys, including record of the year, the first time a Canadian had taken that award. Walter Afanasieff produced the radio version that appeared on her album.[1] [2] [3]

That album was Let's Talk About Love, released in November 1997 and billed as the sequel to Falling into You. It came with a remarkable guest list. Barbra Streisand sang Tell Him with her. The Bee Gees joined her on Immortality, the tenor Luciano Pavarotti on I Hate You Then I Love You, and The Reason was co written by Carole King and produced by the Beatles' producer George Martin. It sold two hundred and thirty thousand copies in Canada in its first week, still a record there, and more than thirty one million worldwide. Combined with the Titanic soundtrack, Sony said the two albums sold more than sixty million copies.[1] [2] [3]

Céline closed the decade at full speed. The 1998 Christmas album These Are Special Times included I'm Your Angel, a duet written and produced by R. Kelly, which spent six weeks at number one in America. Years later, when abuse allegations against Kelly resurfaced, her management withdrew the song from her releases in January 2019. The album also held The Prayer, her duet with Andrea Bocelli, which won a Golden Globe. She sang at VH1 Divas Live with Aretha Franklin, Gloria Estefan, Shania Twain and Mariah Carey, and her Let's Talk About Love tour became the highest grossing tour by a woman in the 1990s.[1] [2] [3]

A break, a baby and Las Vegas

In 1999 René was diagnosed with cancer in his throat, and Céline stepped away from the stage for what became a three year break. Before his treatment began, the couple turned to fertility treatment, and in May 2000 she had two small operations at a clinic in New York. The tabloids would not leave them alone. The National Enquirer ran a false story claiming she was pregnant with twins. She sued for more than twenty million dollars, and the paper printed a full apology and retraction and made a donation to the American Cancer Society. On the twenty fifth of January 2001, in Florida, their son René-Charles was born, conceived through in vitro fertilisation.[1] [2] [3]

There was darker news behind the scenes. According to the Globe and Mail, a woman claimed that René had sexually assaulted her in a hotel room and demanded two million dollars. He paid her, later explaining that he did not want to fight the claim while he was battling cancer and trying to have a child. Two years later, the woman and her husband demanded another ten million dollars. René's lawyer invited them to a meeting in Las Vegas that turned out to be an undercover police operation, and the couple were arrested and charged with extortion. René and Céline also went to court over a Quebec gossip magazine's claim that they had rented a hotel pool to swim nude.[1] [2] [3]

After the attacks of the eleventh of September 2001, Céline returned to television to sing God Bless America at the benefit concert America: A Tribute to Heroes. That December she published her autobiography, My Story, My Dream. In March 2002 she ended her break with A New Day Has Come, an album shaped by motherhood. It entered the Billboard chart at number one, her first album ever to debut at the top in America, with more than half a million copies sold in its first week. The title song spent twenty one weeks at number one on the adult contemporary chart, breaking the record she had set herself with Because You Loved Me.[1]

Then she did something the music business thought was crazy. Inspired by the water show O, which she had seen during her break, she signed to perform five nights a week at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, reportedly for about a hundred million dollars over three years. A four thousand seat theatre modelled on the Roman Colosseum was built for her. At the time, a promoter recalled, Vegas was seen as the place you went when your career was going downhill. A New Day, directed by Franco Dragone, opened on the twenty fifth of March 2003. It ran until December 2007, grossed about three hundred and eighty five million dollars and sold around two point eight million tickets.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The residency brought surprising fans. Prince reportedly went three times, and Justin Timberlake hosted the opening night television special. It also brought headlines about René's gambling. In January 2007 a senior casino executive, the former Las Vegas mayor Jan Jones, told a British newspaper he probably gambled a million dollars a week. She later retracted it, and Caesars, with his permission, said his losses for 2005 and 2006 were about two hundred and thirty thousand dollars, more than offset by his poker winnings. In between, Céline released the dance tinged One Heart, the lullaby album Miracle, and a French record with Goldman and friends called 1 fille et 4 types.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Taking chances

In November 2007 Céline released Taking Chances, a rockier English album made with writers and producers such as Linda Perry, Ne-Yo and the former Evanescence guitarist Ben Moody. She said she felt a little gutsier than in the past. In February 2008 she launched a world tour in South Africa, directed by Jamie King, who had worked with Madonna. It played a hundred and thirty two dates on five continents and grossed about two hundred and seventy nine million dollars. A British critic who arrived expecting stuffy ballads found a dancing, joking Céline and decided she had been replaced by a new version of herself.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty second of August 2008 she gave a free concert, mostly in French, on the Plains of Abraham for Quebec City's four hundredth birthday. Around four hundred and ninety thousand people came. René had made sure the site would hold as many people as a Paul McCartney concert there a month earlier. That same year France made her a knight of the Legion of Honour. When the Los Angeles Times combined album sales and concert takings for the whole decade from 2000 to 2009, Céline came out on top of every artist, with about seven hundred and forty eight million dollars, most of it from Las Vegas.[1] [2] [3]

She even flirted with opera. In June 2008, between tour dates, she sang for the conductor Kent Nagano in Berlin, partly to test whether she could play Maria Callas in a planned film. She admitted to him three times that she did not know the operas he named or read music, but chose two extracts from Carmen, which she had sung in Quebec City in 1989. She told him she was a mezzo soprano. He replied that everything she had just sung was soprano. There was sadness in her private life. After years of fertility treatment she suffered a miscarriage in 2009, but on the twenty third of October 2010 she gave birth to twin boys in Florida.[1] [2] [3]

The twins arrived at eleven minutes past eleven and twelve minutes past eleven in the morning. They were named Eddy, after Eddy Marnay, the lyricist who produced her first five albums, and Nelson, after Nelson Mandela. On the fifteenth of March 2011 she returned to Caesars Palace with a new show simply called Celine. To promote it she went on The Oprah Winfrey Show for a record twenty seventh time. The new residency ran on a looser schedule of about seventy shows a year, leaving time to tour. In 2012 she released Sans attendre, which went diamond in France, and in 2013 the English album Loved Me Back to Life, with duets with Ne-Yo and Stevie Wonder.[1] [2] [3]

Losing René

In December 2013 René's throat cancer returned, and surgery removed part of his tongue and limited his speech. In June 2014 he stepped down as Céline's manager after more than thirty years, replaced by Aldo Giampaolo, a former Cirque du Soleil executive. In August she put her career on hold indefinitely. She said she wanted to devote every ounce of her strength to her husband's healing, and her team revealed she was also suffering an illness that inflamed her throat muscles. She went back to Caesars Palace in August 2015. She said René wanted her there, and that her biggest job now was to tell him the family would be fine.[1] [2] [3]

René Angélil died of throat cancer on the fourteenth of January 2016 at the family home in Henderson, near Las Vegas, two days short of his seventy fourth birthday. He had been fed through a tube for two years and had planned his own funeral. Two days later, on what would have been René's birthday, Céline's brother Daniel died of cancer at fifty nine. René received a national funeral at Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal, the church where the couple had married. Their son René-Charles, just short of fifteen, gave the eulogy, joking that he and his father had talked through golf, hockey, poker and smoked meat. Quebec flew its flags at half mast.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Céline went back to Las Vegas in February 2016 to a sold out crowd. She kept René close in her own way. Before every show she shook a bronze replica of his hand and knocked on wood with it, and his seat at the sound desk was left empty. In May, at the Billboard Music Awards, René-Charles presented her with the Icon Award, and she sang Queen's The Show Must Go On. That summer came Encore un soir, a French album whose title song was written by Jean-Jacques Goldman and dedicated to René. It went diamond in France. Pink wrote her a song called Recovering after his death.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Life moved on in new directions. She became a fashion figure, a face of L'Oréal Paris and a star of Paris Fashion Week, and launched a gender neutral children's clothing line called Celinununu. In 2018 she recorded Ashes for the film Deadpool 2, and a remix topped the American dance club chart. On the eighth of June 2019 she played the last night of her second residency. Across the two shows she had given more than eleven hundred performances in Las Vegas, sold about four and a half million tickets and grossed about six hundred and eighty one million dollars, the two biggest residencies in the city's history.[1] [2] [3]

Courage and a hidden illness

Her next English album was called Courage, and she said the word described exactly how she felt after three hard years of raising her sons without René and wondering if she would sing again. It came out on the fifteenth of November 2019 with writers and producers including Sia, Sam Smith and David Guetta. It entered the Billboard chart at number one, her first chart topping album in America in seventeen years, which meant she had number one albums in three different decades. The Courage World Tour opened in Quebec City in September 2019. She played fifty two shows before the pandemic stopped it. Her last full concert was in Newark, New Jersey, on the eighth of March 2020.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In January 2022 she cancelled her North American dates because of severe muscle spasms. Then, on the eighth of December 2022, in a tearful video, she revealed she had stiff person syndrome, a rare and incurable neurological disorder that makes muscles lock and spasm. She said the spasms affected every part of her daily life, sometimes made it hard to walk and stopped her singing the way she was used to. Her sister Claudette later said Céline did not have control over her muscles. In May 2023 she cancelled every remaining show of the tour. She told fans she was not giving up.[1] [2] [3] [4]

It turned out the struggle had been going on far longer than anyone knew. She later said she had lived with symptoms for about seventeen years before the diagnosis, quietly asking her musical director to lower songs by a key and pushing her voice to hold notes that once came easily. The spasms were so strong that they broke ribs. In 2024 she revealed that in her desperation she had taken near lethal doses of Valium to cope. She was treated by Amanda Piquet, an autoimmune neurology specialist in Colorado, and her foundation gave two million dollars to research at the university there. With medicine and therapy, she said, her voice was being rebuilt.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2023 she made her acting debut, playing herself in the romantic comedy Love Again with Priyanka Chopra, and recorded songs for its soundtrack. In June 2024 came I Am: Celine Dion, a documentary by the director Irene Taylor. It did not look away from the pain, and one scene shows her suffering a seizure. In the film she vowed that if she could not run, she would walk, and if she could not walk, she would crawl, but she would not stop. It became the most watched documentary Amazon Prime Video had ever streamed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The comeback in Paris

On the twenty sixth of July 2024, after four hours of rain soaked pageantry, the Paris Olympic opening ceremony ended with Céline Dion alone on the first level of the Eiffel Tower. Accompanied by her pianist and musical director Scott Price, she sang Édith Piaf's Hymne à l'amour. It was her first live performance in four years, and her second Olympic opening ceremony after Atlanta. The Guardian called it a dazzling and emotional return. Two weeks later she objected when Donald Trump's campaign used a video of her singing My Heart Will Go On at a rally in Montana, saying the use was not authorised and asking whether that song was really the right choice.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the thirtieth of March 2026, her fifty eighth birthday, Céline announced in a video shown beneath the Eiffel Tower that she would return to the stage that September with a series of shows in Paris. She said she was managing her health, singing again and even doing a little dancing. The response was overwhelming. About nine million people signed up for a lottery to buy tickets, and the shows sold out within hours. The run grew to twenty six nights at the Paris La Défense Arena, now called the Plenitude Arena, the biggest indoor venue in Europe, running as of 2026 into May 2027. In April she released Dansons, a new French song written by Jean-Jacques Goldman.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Paris went a little Céline crazy. City hall threw a free outdoor karaoke night for ten thousand people, and a nearby transit station was temporarily renamed after her. On Saturday the twelfth of September 2026, she walked out in black before around thirty thousand people and began with On ne change pas, a Jean-Jacques Goldman song. She had promised herself not to cry, she told the crowd, but she broke that promise almost at once and let the audience sing for her. It was her first full concert in more than six years. She told them she had made a promise to come back, and here she was, singing for them and for herself.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The show was far from a victory lap. She told the audience in French that she was well, and that she had learned to live with her fragility and turn it into strength. Late in the night she stood on a stone ledge as fake snow fell and sang an aria from La Wally, the opera piece made famous by Maria Callas. For the encore she took on the high note in All by Myself, the one David Foster once challenged her to hit, and landed it. Critics noted a voice that sometimes wavered and sometimes astonished. Rolling Stone said she seemed almost surprised by what her body could still do.[1] [2]

Céline Dion has sold more than two hundred million records, which makes her the best selling Canadian artist and the best selling French language artist of all time. D'eux remains the biggest French album ever, and My Heart Will Go On one of the best selling singles in history. She changed Las Vegas, proving a star at the top could stay in one place and thrive, and she carried French language songs to countries that had never heard them. Critics have often mocked her sentimentality and big gestures, and comedians love to imitate her accent. But from the drawer in Charlemagne to a sold out arena in Paris, her story remains one of the most remarkable in pop music.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Celine Dion

Celine Dion and René Angélil. He heard a twelve year old's demo when his own career was at a dead end, mortgaged his house to make her first record and managed her for more than thirty years. He was twenty six years older and twice divorced, and critics called him a Svengali. Their romance began around Eurovision in 1988, they married in 1994, and they had three sons through fertility treatment. He died of throat cancer in 2016, and she has called him the first and only man of her life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Celine Dion and Thérèse Dion. Her mother co wrote Céline's very first song with her son Jacques, took her to meet René Angélil and travelled everywhere with her daughter until Céline was nineteen, even sharing her room. Thérèse strongly opposed the romance with René at first because of his age and his two divorces, and Céline told her firmly that no one had the right to stop her loving whoever she wanted. Thérèse eventually accepted him. She died in 2020.[1] [2] [3]

Celine Dion and Jean-Jacques Goldman. The French singer and songwriter wrote and produced D'eux, which became the best selling French language album of all time, then S'il suffisait d'aimer, and worked on 1 fille et 4 types. His songs adapted into English on Falling into You earned him a share of the album of the year Grammy. Encore un soir, his tribute to René, and her 2026 comeback song Dansons both came from his pen, and she opened her Paris return with his On ne change pas.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Celine Dion and David Foster. The Canadian producer worked on her first English album, Unison, and Céline credited him and René with opening the international door. He produced The Power of Love and Because You Loved Me, played piano for her at the 1996 Olympics, co wrote The Prayer and Tell Him, and pushed her to hit the unplanned high note on All by Myself by warning that someone else would sing it if she could not.[1] [2] [3]

Celine Dion and James Horner. The Titanic composer wrote My Heart Will Go On with lyricist Will Jennings and chose Céline to sing it, despite her reluctance and James Cameron's objections. He carried her demo around for weeks, waiting for the right moment to play it. Their song won an Oscar and four Grammys. Horner died when his plane crashed in California in June 2015, aged sixty one, and Céline later spoke of him looking down on them.[1] [2] [3]

Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand. Céline has named Streisand as one of her most important idols, and she was first introduced to Céline's music by the tennis star Andre Agassi. After Céline sang Streisand's I Finally Found Someone at the 1997 Oscars, Streisand sent flowers and suggested they record together. The result was Tell Him in 1997. Their planned Grammy performance of it was cancelled when Streisand fell ill with flu.[1] [2]

Celine Dion and Jim Steinman. The producer behind Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler gave Céline one of her most dramatic songs, It's All Coming Back to Me Now, which he wrote and produced for Falling into You, along with productions of River Deep Mountain High and Call the Man. He also designed the gothic motorcycle story in its video. Giving her the song caused a lasting rift with Meat Loaf, who believed it had been promised to him.[1] [2] [3]

Celine Dion and Walter Afanasieff. Afanasieff produced her Beauty and the Beast single and the album version of My Heart Will Go On, which won record of the year. He admitted he first found Horner's demo meandering and dreary, rebuilt the track from scratch, and was upset when the label told him to share the production credit with Horner. He also co wrote the Streisand duet Tell Him.[1] [2] [3]

Celine Dion and R. Kelly. Kelly wrote and produced I'm Your Angel, their 1998 duet, which spent six weeks at number one in America and remains the last American number one for both singers as of 2026. In January 2019, as sexual abuse allegations against Kelly resurfaced, Céline's management had the song and its video removed from her releases on streaming services. It remains available on Kelly's own releases.[1]

Celine Dion and Eddy Marnay. The French lyricist, who had written for Édith Piaf, was introduced to René Angélil in Paris and became Céline's first great songwriter, producing her first five albums from La voix du bon Dieu onward. She called him her favourite French songwriter, and she named one of her twin sons, born in 2010, Eddy in his honour.[1] [2] [3]

Celine Dion and Meat Loaf. The two never recorded together, but they became rivals over a single song. Meat Loaf believed Jim Steinman had promised him It's All Coming Back to Me Now, and when Céline's version became a worldwide hit in 1996, he was furious and took legal action. He lost, and ten years later recorded it himself with Marion Raven.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Celine Dion

• As a baby, Céline slept in a drawer because her family could not afford a crib. Céline told Vanity Fair that her mother put a pillow in a drawer for the new baby. With fourteen children, three or four sharing a bed was normal, and she said they never had money but always had love.[1] [2]
• She was named after a French pop song, Céline, recorded by Hugues Aufray two years before she was born. Music ran so deep in the Dion family that the youngest child took her name from a hit record. Hugues Aufray had released his song Céline in 1966, two years before her birth in 1968.[1] [2]
• At her first audition for René Angélil, twelve year old Céline sang into a pen instead of a microphone. She was not used to singing without a microphone, so Angélil handed her a pen to hold. By the end of the song he was crying, and he later called her the royal flush of his career.[1] [2]
• Céline's hometown named a street after her, but Quebec would not officially recognise it because she is still alive. Charlemagne's town council named one of its main streets after its famous daughter and even put up a giant globe with her name on it. The globe was eventually taken down.[1]
• At sixteen she sang for Pope John Paul the Second in front of sixty thousand people. On the eleventh of September 1984, during the pope's visit to Canada, Céline sang Une colombe at Montreal's Olympic Stadium. The song became a hit and won her two Félix Awards.[1]
• She was the first Canadian artist ever to earn a gold record in France. Her 1982 single D'amour ou d'amitié topped the Quebec chart for four weeks and reached number five in France, where it went gold. She was still in her early teens.[1] [2]
• In her Eurovision introduction film, Céline was shown riding heavy farm machinery in Switzerland. Each Eurovision entry is introduced by a short postcard film. Before she sang Ne partez pas sans moi for Switzerland in 1988, viewers saw the Canadian teenager on farm equipment.[1]
• As of 2026, her 1988 Eurovision winner is still the last French language song to win the contest. Ne partez pas sans moi beat Britain by a single point, one hundred and thirty seven to one hundred and thirty six. No song sung in French has won the contest since.[1] [2]
• She first sang Where Does My Heart Beat Now in public while opening the 1989 Eurovision Song Contest. As the reigning champion, Céline opened the 1989 contest in Lausanne. She sang her winning song and premiered her first English single, and she also handed the trophy to the new winner.[1] [2]
• In 1989 a doctor told her to have throat surgery or stay completely silent for three weeks. After injuring her voice on tour, specialist William Gould gave her the ultimatum. She chose three weeks of total silence, then rebuilt her technique with the vocal coach William Riley.[1]
• Céline once recorded a bilingual Christmas song with Alvin and the Chipmunks. For the 1994 holiday album A Very Merry Chipmunk, she sang Petit Papa Noël in French and English with the cartoon rodents.[1]
• Disney only added Peabo Bryson to Beauty and the Beast because it thought Céline was too unknown in America. Disney first wanted Céline alone for the pop version of the title song, but worried a newcomer would not reach a big enough American audience. She had also just lost the Fievel Goes West theme.[1]
• The famous high note in All by Myself was never planned. David Foster added it during recording. When Céline asked why, he said that if she could not sing it, other singers would, so she set out to prove she could.[1]
• D'eux was released on Céline's twenty seventh birthday. The album that became the best selling French language record ever came out in Canada on the thirtieth of March 1995. It was recorded in Paris in late 1994.[1] [2]
• She cut her bare feet on gravel filming the video for It's All Coming Back to Me Now and did not tell the director. Nigel Dick had her run across gravel five times to get the shot. She turned up the next day with bandaged feet. The video was filmed at Ploskovice Castle near Prague.[1] [2]
• The original singer of It's All Coming Back to Me Now used to leave shops in tears when Céline's version played. Elaine Caswell of Pandora's Box recorded it in 1989. She told CBC that Céline's hit used the same backing track with a new vocal, and hearing it on the radio made her cry.[1]
• Céline drank black coffee with sugar before the My Heart Will Go On demo, which she normally avoided. She said coffee sped up her vibrato, so she never had it on studio days. She was in a bad mood and unwell that day, and the demo vocal still ended up in the film.[1]
• At the 1998 Oscars, her six bodyguards were there for the necklace, not for her. She wore a necklace reportedly worth two hundred million dollars while singing My Heart Will Go On. When she thumped her chest, she felt the guards tense up. She did not get to keep it.[1]
• Told that Kate Winslet felt sick hearing My Heart Will Go On, Céline joked, thank God she didn't have to sing it. Producer Jon Landau later explained that Winslet's complaint was that restaurants kept playing the song whenever she walked in, not the song itself.[1]
• My Heart Will Go On was the first English language song to top Billboard's Hot Latin Tracks chart. The Titanic theme topped several American charts in 1998, and its Latin chart success earned Céline a Billboard Latin Music Award.[1]
• In 1997 she became the first artist to perform twice on the same Oscars night. She sang her own nominee Because You Loved Me and, at two days' notice, replaced Natalie Cole on Barbra Streisand's I Finally Found Someone.[1]
• Barbra Streisand first heard Céline's music thanks to the tennis star Andre Agassi. Agassi introduced Streisand to her records years before their 1997 duet Tell Him. Agassi later became a business partner, co owning the Las Vegas nightclub Pure with Céline.[1] [2]
• I'm Your Angel was the first Hot 100 number one under Billboard's rule allowing airplay only songs to chart. Her 1998 duet with R. Kelly spent six weeks at number one, and as of 2026 remains the most recent American number one for both artists.[1]
• A New Day Has Come spent twenty one weeks at number one on the adult contemporary chart, beating her own record. The previous record of nineteen weeks was shared by Phil Collins's You'll Be in My Heart and Céline's Because You Loved Me.[1] [2]
• Her Las Vegas theatre cost about ninety five million dollars and was built specially for her. The Colosseum at Caesars Palace seats over four thousand people, more than New York's Metropolitan Opera House, and was modelled on the Roman original.[1] [2]
• Céline has joked that some people do drugs and she buys shoes, with around six hundred pairs. She told Vanity Fair in 2011 that she might own six hundred pairs of shoes, and asked whether that made her a freak.[1]
• She holds the record for appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, with twenty seven. Her twenty seventh visit came in February 2011, during the final season, to promote her second Las Vegas residency. She has been described as Oprah's favourite celebrity guest.[1] [2]
• She auditioned for conductor Kent Nagano partly to see if she could play Maria Callas in a film. In Berlin in 2008 she sang two pieces from Carmen. She admitted she could not read music, and Nagano reassured her that Pavarotti could not either.[1]
• Her twin sons were born at eleven eleven and eleven twelve in the morning. Eddy and Nelson arrived by caesarean on the twenty third of October 2010 in West Palm Beach, Florida, named after lyricist Eddy Marnay and Nelson Mandela.[1]
• Before every show after René died, Céline shook a bronze replica of his hand. She said she knocked on wood with the bronze hand before each performance, and during her Las Vegas shows his seat at the sound desk was kept empty in his honour.[1]
• An asteroid is named after René Angélil. In 2021, asteroid 241364, discovered by the amateur astronomer Michel Ory in 2008, was officially named Reneangelil.[1]
• René Angélil's 1960s group Les Baronets sang Beatles songs in French. Before managing anyone, Angélil was a pop singer. Les Baronets turned British Invasion hits into French, including a version of the Beatles' Hold Me Tight.[1] [2] [3]
• René Angélil's first son was born just two months before Céline. Patrick Angélil was born in January 1968. Céline, his father's future wife, arrived that March.[1]
• In 2011 Céline's lawyers shut down a blog called Ridiculous Pictures of Celine Dion. Its founder received a cease and desist letter and deleted the archive, saying he could not afford a lawyer. He said he planned to frame the letter.[1]
• New Zealand's siren kings consider The Power of Love the ultimate song for their loudspeaker battles. Members of this street subculture compete to play music loudly and clearly through emergency siren speakers. One said the track would beat anyone.[1]
• Her twin sons' love of Barbie dolls inspired a gender neutral children's clothing line. After a trip to Disneyland where the boys wanted dolls rather than action figures, Céline launched Celinununu in 2018, saying children should wear what they feel.[1] [2]
• In 2009 she helped pay the care home fees of the last living Titanic survivor. With Leonardo DiCaprio, James Cameron and Kate Winslet, she supported Millvina Dean, the last living survivor of the sinking. The campaign raised thirty thousand dollars.[1]
• For her 2026 Paris comeback, a nearby transit station was temporarily renamed after her. Paris city hall also staged a free outdoor karaoke for ten thousand people, and the region expected her shows to bring up to eight hundred million euros into the local economy.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

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