Celine Dion

Céline Marie Claudette Dion (born 30 March 1968) is a Canadian singer. Referred to as the "Queen of Power Ballads", her powerful, technically skilled vocals and commercially successful works have had a significant impact on popular music. With over 200 million records sold worldwide, Dion is the best-selling Canadian recording artist, the best-selling French-language artist, and one of the best-selling musical artists of all time.

Born into a large family in Charlemagne, Quebec, Dion was discovered by her future manager and husband, René Angélil, and emerged as a teen star in her home country with eight French-language albums during the 1980s. She gained international recognition by winning the Eurovision Song Contest 1988, where she represented Switzerland with the song "Ne partez pas sans moi". Dion went on to release twelve English-language albums. The Colour of My Love (1993), Falling into You (1996), Let's Talk About Love (1997), and All the Way... A Decade of Song (1999) all rank among the best-selling albums of all time. Her catalog of high-charting tracks includes "Beauty and the Beast", "The Power of Love", "Think Twice", "To Love You More", "Because You Loved Me", "It's All Coming Back to Me Now", "All by Myself", "I'm Your Angel", "That's the Way It Is", "I'm Alive", and "My Heart Will Go On"—the theme for the 1997 film Titanic, which is the second-best-selling single by a woman.

Dion continued releasing French-language albums between each English record, with D'eux (1995) becoming the best-selling French-language album of all time. She also built her reputation as a successful live performer, with the Let's Talk About Love World Tour (1998–1999) and the Taking Chances World Tour (2008–2009)—which rank among the highest-grossing concert tours of the 1990s and the 2000s, respectively—as well as A New Day... (2003–2007), the highest-grossing concert residency of all time. Los Angeles Times named her the top-earning artist of the 2000s, with combined album sales and concert revenue exceeding $747 million. In 2022, Dion canceled her Courage World Tour due to a diagnosis with stiff-person syndrome.

Dion's accolades include 5 Grammy Awards, 20 Juno Awards and a recognition from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry for selling over 50 million albums in Europe. Seven of her albums have sold at least 10 million copies worldwide, the second most among women in history. She was ranked among the greatest women in music by VH1 and the greatest voices in music by MTV. Dion is one of the highest-grossing touring artists in history and the second woman to accumulate US$1 billion in concert revenue. One of the wealthiest musicians in the world, Forbes ranked her the highest-paid female musician of 1997, 1998, 2004, and 2006. She received honorary doctorates in music from the Berklee College of Music and the Université Laval. Dion was conferred with the Legion of Honor, the highest French order of merit, and was elevated to the Companion of the Order of Canada.

Dion was born in Charlemagne, Quebec, 24 kilometres (15 mi) northeast of Montreal, the youngest of 14 children of Thérèse (née Tanguay, 1927–2020), a homemaker, and Adhémar Dion (1923–2003), a butcher, both of French Canadian descent. As the youngest of 14 children, Dion grew up wearing hand-me-downs and sharing a bed with several sisters. As a baby, she slept in a drawer instead of a crib to save money. She was bullied at school and called "Vampire" due to her teeth and skinny frame. Local tabloids even dubbed her "Canine Dion" in the teenage years of her career. She often spoke of running home from school to play music in the basement with her brothers and sisters. "I detested school", she would later write in her autobiography. "I had always lived surrounded by adults and children a lot older than me. I learned everything I needed to know from them. As far as I was concerned, real life existed around them." Dion's eldest sister was already in her twenties, married, and pregnant with her first child at the time that Dion's mother, Thérèse, was pregnant with Dion.

Dion was raised a Roman Catholic in a poor but, by her own account, happy home in Charlemagne. Music had always been a major part of the Dion family, and she was named after the song "Céline", which French singer Hugues Aufray had recorded two years before her birth. On 13 August 1973, she performed publicly for the first time at her brother Michel's wedding, singing Christine Charbonneau's "Du fil, des aiguilles et du coton". She continued to perform with her siblings in her parents' small piano bar called Le Vieux Baril, "The Old Barrel".

She suffered a number of accidents as a young child, including an incident at five years old when she was struck by a car as her father and brother Clément looked on. She was hospitalized briefly with a concussion. From an early age, she had dreamed of being a performer. In a 1994 interview with People, she recalled, "I missed my family and my home, but I don't regret having lost my adolescence. I had one dream: I wanted to be a singer." As a child in Quebec, Dion participated in Girl Guide programs as a member of Girl Guides of Canada.

At age 12, she collaborated with her mother and her brother Jacques to write and compose her first song, "Ce n'était qu'un rêve", whose title translates as "It Was Only a Dream" or "Nothing But A Dream". Michel sent the recording to music manager René Angélil, whose name he discovered on the back of a Ginette Reno album. Angélil was moved to tears by Dion's voice and decided to make her a star. In 1981, he mortgaged his home to fund her first record, La voix du bon Dieu, which later became a local No. 1 hit and made her an instant star in Quebec. Her popularity spread to other parts of the world when she competed in the 1982 Yamaha World Popular Song Festival in Tokyo and won the musician's award for "Top Performer" as well as the gold medal for "Best Song" with "Tellement j'ai d'amour pour toi".