The news about the health of Celine Dion, one of the most successful pop singers in history, is not at all encouraging. However, she has just surprised and dazzled the entire world with her participation in the Paris 2024 Olympic Games closing ceremony in the middle of the Eiffel Tower.
In December 2022, she was diagnosed with “stiff-person syndrome,” a rare condition that prevents her from singing, given that this neurological disease weakens her entire body and affects one in a million people.
This year she had to definitively suspend her world tour announced in May, and in recent days her sister Claudette said that the singer “no longer controls her muscles.”
Millions of fans around the world are praying for the recovery of a unique singer who has never stopped excelling and succeeding since she won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1988, representing her native Canada, after a past as a child prodigy of song.
She shone like no one else when she sang the melodies from the films Beauty and the Beast and, above all, the hit My Heart Will Go On from Titanic.
She then won a Grammy in 1996 for her album Falling Into You, and she maintained her success until 2019’s Courage (her fourteenth album to top the Billboard charts).
Furthermore, above all, she laid the groundwork for postponed artistic residencies at the Caesar’s Palace hotel in Las Vegas, which served as inspiration for This Is It, the frustrated return of her idol Michael Jackson, the person who inspired her to learn English, among other milestones in a life full of events.
One success after another
Born in Quebec, a region located in French-speaking Canada, in 1968, at the age of 13, thanks to the single Ce N’etait Qu’un Rêve, Céline reached number one in the regional sales charts.
That song, plus the albums La voix du bon Dieu (1981) and Tellement j’ai d’amour (1982), catapulted her to fame in her country, in France, in Belgium, and in Switzerland—all French-speaking countries.
The success of Incognito (1987), coupled with her triumph at Eurovision with Ne Partez Pas Sans Moi, representing Switzerland, led Dion to carefully prepare her landing in the Anglo-Saxon market. The project came about in 1990 with the album Unison, a collection of pop songs as sticky as good bubble gum and ballads capable of disarming the toughest.
There are singles like If There Was Any Other Way, The Last to Know (previously recorded by Sheena Easton), and the title track, an album that sold a million copies in the United States and millions more around the world.
Shortly after Unison, Disney made Céline an offer she couldn’t refuse: a duet with soul singer Peabo Bryson to perform the theme song for the film Beauty and the Beast. The ballad was so successful, spending weeks in the Billboard Top Ten, that it earned them a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.
An unstoppable rise
Beauty and the Beast was included as the first single from her 1992 album of the same name. There is no doubt that it was a commercial boost, but an album with compositions by hitmakers such as Walter Afanasieff, Diane Warren, and even Prince himself could not fail in terms of sales.
This album consolidated her alongside Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey among the great voices of AOR pop, the so-called Adult Orientated Rock. At the same time, Céline began a torrid romance with her manager, René Angélil, whom she had known as a child and whom she would eventually marry.
But Dion continued her unstoppable rise. The Color of My Love (1993) sold a whopping 20 million copies worldwide, even though critics continued to scorn and mock her and her mezzo-soprano vocal range.
The cover of the standard When I Fall in Love (a duet with the Englishman Clive Griffin), The Power of Love (originally by Jennifer Rush and also covered by Air Supply and Laura Branigan), and Think Twice were some of the workhorses that shone with their own light in the middle of the grunge era.
After a return to her native language (the live album À L’olympia and D’eux, also known as The French Album in the English-speaking market) and a return to English with Falling Into You (which included Because You Loved Me, from the soundtrack of the film Up Close and Personal), it would become the true Everest of Céline Dion’s career.
The album was called Let’s Talk About Love and included duets with the Bee Gees (Immertality), with Barbra Streisand (Tell Him), with Luciano Pavarotti (I Hate You Then I Love You), and a song produced by legendary Beatles producer George Martin (The Reason).
But, believe it or not, all those names pale in comparison to My Heart Will Go On. The central tune of the film Titanic, directed by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, became synonymous with Céline Dion forever.
Paradoxically, American readers of Rolling Stone ranked it as the seventh worst song of the 90s, MTV viewers voted it as the sixth greatest song of the same decade, and the Hollywood Academy gave it an Oscar. All at the same time.
My Heart… has had all kinds of uses and versions, including appearing in The Simpsons. Today, even its most ardent detractors do not hesitate to at least respect it.
Shows in Las Vegas
From this unbeatable milestone, Dion’s career declined, although never to catastrophic levels or anything like that, since all of her albums continued to rank very high in the sales charts.
He even allowed himself the luxury of revitalizing musician residencies in Las Vegas, with a contract with Caesar’s Palace worth more than one hundred million dollars in 2007.
“Since Dion’s debut, hundreds of artists have tried their hand at Las Vegas residencies, including Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Usher, Luke Bryan, Katy Perry, Rod Stewart and Sting.
Once considered “the retirement home for artists past their prime, Las Vegas residency shows are now big business, generating millions in sales ,” said Billboard magazine a couple of years ago, and there’s U2 at the Sphere and their forty shows to revive their Achtung Baby plaque today to confirm it.
Celine Dion must have experienced other moments of deep sadness. On January 14, 2016, Angélil, her husband, died, and two days later her brother Daniel. This made her think about giving up singing.
The release of her album Courage (2019) brought a modernization in sound, thanks to guests such as David Guetta and Sia . The “courage” was due to the fact that she was able to sing and record after the death of her husband.
A world tour was first thwarted by the Coronavirus and then, after a brief stay in Las Vegas, the diagnosis of his illness thwarted all live performances, until it became the news that everyone knows.
Earlier, in 2020, just days after the fourth anniversary of her husband’s death, Céline Dion had to go through a new and painful moment: the death of her mother.
The latest information only makes us hope that the twilight of her life will be as painless as possible, and hope for a miracle. Hope is the last thing to be lost, and her recent appearance in Paris makes all fans think that a miracle could happen.
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