Dion, Celine

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CELINE DION

Born: Charlemagne, Quebec, 30 March 1968

Genre: Rock; Pop Best-selling album since 1990: Let's Talk About Love (1997)

Hit songs since 1990: "My Heart Will Go On," "A New Day Has Come," "Because You Loved Me"

Singer Celine Dion has hurdled language and cultural barriers in her climb to become one of pop music's most recognized divas. Known for her remarkable vocal range and power, the Canadian-born Dion is an international superstar whose recordings have sold more than 150 million copies.

Humble Beginnings

Dion grew up thirty miles east of Montreal in the French-speaking village of Charlemagne, Quebec, the youngest of fourteen children in a family that loved music. Her parents, both musicians, owned a nightclub and the entire family would perform for patrons on the weekends. Dion created a stir early on when, at the age of five, customers of the club would clamor for her to sing. She idolized Ginette Reno and copied many songs from the popular Canadian singer's repertoire. At twelve, she recorded a demo tape of a French song that she had composed with her mother and one of her brothers. The tape was dropped off at the office of a successful Montreal-based agent named Rene Angelil who had once guided Reno's career. After some persuasion by Dion's brother to listen to the tape, Angelil was convinced that she possessed superstar talent. He set aside all other duties to personally manage Dion's career, and at one juncture even mortgaged his house to finance her first album.

By age eighteen, Dion had recorded nine albums—all in French—and toured extensively around the world. She was a major star in Canada and was well established in France where her single, "L'amour ou d'amite," went gold in 1983. Nevertheless, she yearned for American pop music success. Angelil, at this point in complete control of Dion's career, decided that she should disappear from public to regroup and concentrate on her English. She emerged a year later sporting a trendier look and began preliminary work on her first English-language album while continuing to gratify her primary fan base by touring Canada. In the meantime, a romance developed between Dion and Angelil, but it was kept secret primarily over concerns that fans might not accept the twenty-six year difference in their ages.

Dion accomplished her long-awaited foray into the English market by releasing Unison (1990). Critics complained that she sang inexpressively, the result of her managing the English language in only its phonetic sense. However, there was no denying her magnificent voice and the album produced four Top Ten singles including "Where Does My Heart Beat Now?" Unison sold over 1 million copies, a remarkable feat for a debut album, but it paled in comparison to what was yet to come.

Mainstream Success

She followed Unison with a French-language release, Dion Chante Plamondon (1991), which was Canada's best-selling French album in 1992. Nevertheless, she received a backlash from some in the French-Canadian music industry who felt slighted by her English-speaking music efforts. Undeterred, Dion charged on to the American pop music scene with Celine Dion (1992). The album featured her previously recorded duet with Peabo Bryson of the title song for Disney's film, Beauty and the Beast (1991), and included hits, "If You Asked Me," "Love Can Move Mountains," and "Water from the Moon." Beauty and the Beast earned both a Grammy Award and an Academy Award and the album catapulted Dion to global pop music superstardom. She followed the release of Celine Dion by headlining her first U.S. concert tour along with Michael Bolton, further launching her with American audiences.

A movie soundtrack theme song, "When I Fall in Love," from the film Sleepless in Seattle (1993) was the centerpiece of her next album, The Colour of My Love (1993). The album was enormously successful, but it was important for another reason: The album's liner notes announced publicly that she and Angelil were in love. They married the following year in a ceremony that was televised throughout Canada. Incidentally, Dion used the media hype from the wedding to benefit her most important charity. She and Angelil asked—in lieu of wedding gifts—for donations toward the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. In 1993 Dion was deeply affected by the death of her niece, Karine, who passed away in her arms. She memorialized Karine with the song "Vole," which was added to her French-language album, D'euxalbum (1995). An English translation of the song titled "Fly" appeared on the mega-successful Falling into You (1996). Her wedding raised over $200,000 for the charity.

Over the next five years, alternating between French and English recordings, Dion worked nonstop. In 1997 she recorded her most prolific song, "My Heart Will Go On," from the soundtrack to the film Titanic (1996). It was included on Let's Talk About Love (1997), which also features duets with Barbra Streisand, the Bee Gees, and Luciano Pavarotti. On the strength of "My Heart Will Go On," Titanic became the all-time biggest selling orchestral soundtrack and Let's Talk About Love sold more than 31 million copies.

Dion began the new millennium by announcing that she was taking a break from performing to start a family and to be with her husband, who had been diagnosed with throat cancer. He later made a full recovery. The hiatus gave her time to reflect on a career that has been showered with awards from all over the world, including six Grammy Awards, two Academy Awards, and countless Juno, Felix, and World Music Awards in Canada and Europe. Dion's record sales and concert appearances made the French-speaking Canadian one of the wealthiest performers in the United States. In January 2001 Dion gave birth to her first child, a boy named Rene-Charles Angelil. The following year she released A New Day Has Come (2002), and within two weeks it reached number one in seventeen countries including the United States. Dion drew praise from critics regarding A New Day Has Come for relying less on her relentless five-octave power style, opting instead for a more lilting, subtle vocal sound.

In 2003 Dion and her family relocated to Las Vegas, where she began a three-year commitment to perform her new show, A New Day, at Caesars Palace. In conjunction with the opening of the concert spectacular, Dion released My Heart (2003).

Renowned in Canada and Western Europe well before her successful crossover into English-language songs, Celine Dion is one of pop music's strongest and most passionate voices. As her English has become more agile, so has her musical styling. Dion is gaining the same comfort with varieties of rock and soul music as she has with the sweeping, emotional ballads that first brought her fame.

Spot Light: Las Vegas Concerts

Celine Dion opened a Las Vegas concert extravaganza on March 25, 2003, at the Colosseum, owned by Caesars Palace. She is under contract to play the four-thousand-seat arena over the next three years for five nights weekly, forty weeks per year. The famous designer, Franco Dragone, the artistic force behind Cirque du Soleil, created the abstract production. A New Day rehearsed five months as it combined a variety of multimedia and several stage settings with specialty performers and more than fifty dancers in a concert spectacular where tickets cost up to $200 per seat. Dion performs her concert classics, including "My Heart Will Go On," in an eighteen-song set that mixes in Las Vegas musical fare such as "Fever" and "I've Got the World on a String." Her opening number is "Nature Boy," made famous by the legendary singer Nat King Cole.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Unison (Epic, 1990); Dion Chante Plamondon (550 Music, 1991); Celine Dion (Epic, 1992); The Christmas Album (Inter-scope, 1993); The Colour of My Love (550 Music, 1993); D'eux (also known as The French Album (550 Music, 1995); Falling into You (550 Music, 1996); Let's Talk About Love (550 Music, 1997); These Are Special Times (550 Music, 1998); All the Way . . . A Decade of Song (Epic, 1999); The French Love Album (Empire, 2001); A New Day Has Come (Epic, 2002); One Heart (Epic, 2003). Soundtracks: Sleepless in Seattle (Sony, 1993); Titanic: Music from the Motion Picture (Sony, 1997).