Celine Dion's manager mortgaged his house to record a twelve-year-old from Quebec
The youngest of fourteen children, Celine Dion slept in a drawer as a baby because the family could not spare money for a crib. At twelve she sent a homemade song to a manager, who was moved to tears and mortgaged his house to fund her first record. She went on to sell more than 200 million.
Dion was born in 1968 in Charlemagne, a small town northeast of Montreal, to a homemaker and a butcher. Money was tight, but music filled the house; she was named after a French pop song, sang at her brother's wedding at five and performed with her siblings in the family's tiny piano bar. School she hated, and classmates teased her about her teeth and thin frame.
Her brother Michel mailed her first song, written with her mother and another brother, to René Angélil, having found his name on the back of an album sleeve. Angélil staked his home on her debut, which topped the local charts and made her a star in Quebec by 1981. The next year she won prizes at a song festival in Tokyo, and in 1983 she became the first Canadian to earn a gold record in France. In 1988 she won the Eurovision Song Contest, singing for Switzerland.
Wanting to be as big as Michael Jackson, she spent months remaking herself: dental work, English lessons at a Berlitz school, and, after straining her voice, three weeks of complete vocal rest rather than surgery. Her English debut, Unison, arrived in 1990, and a duet on the title song of Disney's Beauty and the Beast brought her first Grammy. When French-Canadian fans accused her of abandoning them, she publicly turned down an award for English artist of the year, insisting she was a French singer. Her romance with Angélil, 26 years her senior, stayed secret until she dedicated a 1993 album to him; they married on live Canadian television in 1994.
Then came the huge years: My Heart Will Go On from Titanic, the best-selling French-language album ever with D'eux, and a Las Vegas residency that became the highest grossing of its kind. She was the second woman to earn a billion dollars from concerts. In 2022 a diagnosis of stiff-person syndrome forced her to cancel a world tour, and in 2026 she began a residency in Paris.
Source: Celine Dion
