Celine Dion

Céline Marie Claudette Dion, OC, OQ (born March 30, 1968) is a Canadian singer, and occasional songwriter and actress. Born to a large, impoverished family in Charlemagne, Quebec, Dion emerged as a teen star in the French-speaking world after her manager and future husband René Angélil mortgaged his home to finance her first record. In 1990 she released the anglophone album Unison, establishing herself as a viable pop artist in North America and other English speaking areas of the world.

Dion first gained international recognition in the 1980s after she won the 1982 Yamaha World Popular Song Festival and the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest. Following a series of French albums in the early 1980s, she signed on to Sony Records in 1986. With the help of her husband, she achieved worldwide success with several English and French albums, ending the decade as one of the most successful artists in pop music. However, in 1999, at the height of her success, Dion announced a temporary retraction from entertainment in order to start a family and spend time with her husband, who had been diagnosed with cancer. She returned to the music scene in 2002 and signed a four-year contract to perform nightly in a five-star theatrical show at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas.

Dion's music has been influenced by genres ranging from pop, soul and rock to gospel and classical, and while her releases have often received mixed critical reception, she is renowned for her technically skilled and powerful vocals. In 2004, after accumulating record sales in excess of 175 million, she was presented with the Chopard Diamond Award from the World Music Awards show for becoming the "Best-selling Female Artist in the World." In April 2007 Sony BMG announced that Celine Dion had sold more than 200 million albums worldwide.

Childhood and early beginnings

Dion's performance at the Yamaha World Popular Song Festival won her the gold medal as well as the award for being the top performer.The youngest of fourteen children born to Adhémar Dion and Thérèse Tanguay, Céline Dion was raised a Roman Catholic in a poverty-stricken, but, by her own account, happy, home in Charlemagne. Music had always been a part of the family, as she grew up singing with her siblings in her parents' small piano bar called 'Le Vieux Baril.' From an early age Dion had dreamed of being a performer; In a 1994 interview with People magazine, 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."

At age twelve, Dion collaborated with her mother and her brother Jacques to compose her first song, "Ce n'était qu'un rêve" ("It Was Only a Dream"). Her brother 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. He mortgaged his home to fund her first record, La voix du bon Dieu (a play on words "The Voice of God/The Road to God," 1981), which became a local number-one record and made Dion 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, Japan, 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" ("I Have So Much Love for You"). By 1983, in addition to becoming the first Canadian artist to receive a gold record in France for the single "D'amour ou d'amitié" ("Of Love or of Friendship"), Dion had also won several Félix Awards, including "Best Female performer" and "Discovery of the Year." Further success in Europe, Asia, and Australia came when Dion represented Switzerland in the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Ne partez pas sans moi" ("Don't Go Without Me") and won the contest in Dublin, Ireland. However, American success was yet to come, partly because she was exclusively a Francophone artist.

At eighteen, after seeing a Michael Jackson performance, Dion told Angélil that she wanted to be a star like Jackson. Though confident in her talent, Angelil realized that her image needed to be changed in order for her to be marketed worldwide. Dion receded from the spotlight for a number of months, during which she underwent a physical makeover, and was sent to the École Berlitz School in 1989 to polish her English. This marked the start of her English-language music career. According to an episode of VH-1's Behind The Music, she learned to speak English in just three months.

Dion grew up listening to the music of Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Carole King, Anne Murray, Barbra Streisand, and the Bee Gees, all of whom she would eventually collaborate with. During her younger years, which she spent performing in her parents' piano bar along with her other siblings, she also performed many songs by Ginette Reno and other popular Quebecois artists. She has also expressed appreciation for Édith Piaf, Sir Elton John, and opera singer Luciano Pavarotti, as well as many soul singers of the 1960s, 70's and 80's, including Roberta Flack, Etta James and Patti Labelle, whose songs she would later rerecord. Her English-language material has been influenced by numerous genres, including pop, rock, gospel, R&B and soul, and her lyrics focus on themes of poverty, world hunger, and spirituality, with an overemphasis on love and romance. After the birth of her child, her work also began to emphasize maternal bond and brotherly love.

Dion has faced considerable criticism from many critics, who state that her music often retreats behind pop and soul conventions, and marked by excessive sentimentality. According to Keith Harris of Rolling Stone magazine, "[Dion's] sentimentality is bombastic and defiant rather than demure and retiring....[she] stands at the end of the chain of drastic devolution that goes Aretha-Whitney-Mariah. Far from being an aberration, Dion actually stands as a symbol of a certain kind of pop sensibility — bigger is better, too much is never enough, and the riper the emotion the more true." Dion's francophone releases, by contrast, tend to be deeper and more varied than her English releases, and consequently have achieved more credibility.

Dion is often regarded as one of pop music's greatest and most influential voices and according to some sources, she possesses a five octave range. In MTV's "22 Greatest Voices in Music" countdown, she placed ninth (sixth for a female), and she was also placed fourth in Cove magazine's list of "The 100 Outstanding Pop Vocalists." Upon her debut, many critics had welcomed her restrained vocal inflections, and she was praised for her technical virtuosity and intensity. As Charles Alexander of Time writes, "Her voice glides effortlessly from deep whispers to dead-on high notes, a sweet siren that combines force with grace." As her music progressed, however, Dion's vocal performances came to resemble more closely those of her contemporaries, especially Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, and she was heavily criticized for oversinging and for lacking the emotional intensity that once was a part of her earlier work. One critic noted that the emotion, "seems to have been trained right out of her lovely voice," leaving her with "more voice than heart."

Many critics have stated that Dion's involvement in the production aspect of her music is fundamentally lacking, which results in her work being overproduced and impersonal. Additionally, while she came from a family in which all of her siblings were musicians, she never learned to play any musical instruments. However, she did help to compose many of her earlier French songs, and had always tried to involve herself with the production and recording of her albums. On her first English album, which she recorded before she had a firm command of the English language, she expressed disapproval of the record, which, according to her, could have been avoided if she had assumed more creative input. By the time she released her second English album Celine Dion, she had assumed more control of the production and recording process, hoping to dispel earlier criticisms. She stated, "On the second album I said, 'Well, I have the choice to be afraid one more time and not be 100 percent happy, or not be afraid and be part of this album.' This is my album." She would continue to involve herself in the production of subsequent releases, helping to write a few of her songs on Let's Talk About Love (1997) and These Are Special Times (1998).

Despite her success, Dion is often the subject of media ridicule and parody. She is frequently impersonated on shows like MADtv, Saturday Night Live and South Park for her strong accent, as well as her conservative nature and on-stage movements. She is also heavily mocked in her home country of Canada on popular shows Royal Canadian Air Farce and This Hour Has 22 Minutes. However, Dion has stated that she is unaffected by the comments, and has even stated that she is flattered that people take the time to impersonate her. She even invited Ana Gasteyer, who parodied her on SNL, to appear on stage during one of her performances.

Dion is rarely the center of media controversies. However, in 2005, following the Hurricane Katrina disaster, she appeared on Larry King Live and tearfully criticized U.S. President George W. Bush regarding the Iraq War and his slow response in aiding the victims of Hurricane Katrina: "How come it's so easy to send planes in another country, to kill everyone in a second, to destroy lives? We need to be there right now to rescue the rest of the people." She later claimed, "When I do interviews with Larry King or the big TV shows like that, they put you on the spot, which is very difficult. I do have an opinion, but I'm a singer. I'm not a politician."