I think about Celine Dion every day when I have my coffee.
She once told me her treat of the day, the thing that lifts her and calms her, the thing that she looks forward to, is coffee with heavy cream – and it is delicious. I take coffee with half-and-half and it’s still delicious.
I don’t want to swallow the guilt of the heavy cream. Celine is not built to have guilt about anything. She doesn’t care about the cream making her fat or her heart not going on.
She’s like that – fearless.
I first met her in 2007 in strange circumstances. She was mentoring finalists on UK’s The X Factor, and I interviewed her in her trailer. She was already the best-selling female singer of all time, outselling Barbra and Whitney.
And I had already written, “but who buys her?” Who are her fans? She doesn’t have enough shoes to be a fully-fledged gay icon. (Little did I know – today she has a warehouse full of them.) She doesn’t have a teen market.
What she had, I realised later, was an amazing, outstretching voice that reached into the vast expanse of the world’s middle ground music listeners.
She told me: “I don’t try to be cool, that’s not me.”
Back then, her hair was long and, I suspect, real. Her face – which launched a thousand “why the long face?” jokes – wasn’t even that long. She had big eyes and a lovely mouth. She was even sexy.
She was reinventing herself with a song called Taking Chances, written by Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, and Kara DioGuardi.
We sat in her trailer that day and sang the Barbra Streisand/ Barry Gibb song Guilty – that was the strange part. Stranger because I can’t sing, but I went through a stage where I sang during interviews.
I remember a Hugh Jackman interview when I discovered that he and Sting were friends. We sang “I’m an Australian in New York”.
Celine didn’t seem fazed by my singing. We even bonded a little.
A few years later, I went to see her at Caesars Palace. When she started her residency, Vegas was not cool and now it is. Now, it’s a place where top chefs have restaurants.
She did around 70 shows a year until 2019. Unlikely fans came to the show. Prince went three times, Justin Timberlake loved it and Rick Rubin – the record producer who rediscovered the cool of Johnny Cash – also loved it.
It was Cirque du Soleil with voice – hand choreography taken to new levels. Throughout the show, Celine was weirdly available and emotional.
She is even more of both those things in the recent, raw documentary, I Am: Celine Dion, which charts her transformation from the diva of Caesars Palace to a woman who weeps as she confesses she has lost that immense, soaring voice, and so much more besides.
“My voice was the conductor of my life,” she says. “I was following it. You lead the way and I will follow you.”
Celine is the same age as Kylie Minogue – 56 – but she’s always seemed much older. She, too, was a child star, but a different kind of child.
Celine comes from a huge family. She is the youngest of 14 and grew up in a small town near Québec in Canada. Her father was a musician who worked as a lumberjack to make ends meet. Her mother played violin. They were all musical – they sang folk songs in their own family group around Québec – but they were extremely poor.
In the documentary she speaks of a childhood filled with “lots of music, lots of love, lots of happiness”. Her mother, she says, was her superhero.
She remembers being five years old, standing on the kitchen table, “singing for my audience which was my family”. She remembers singing at her brother’s wedding. “Times like this will live forever,” she adds. Her dream as a teenager was “to be an international star and to be able to sing all my life”.
At 12, Celine was signed by manager René Angélil, who was then on his second marriage. It had been dissolved by the time Celine sang for Switzerland in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1988, aged 20.
He was 26 years older than her, but in the euphoria of winning the contest, she kissed him. She said that kiss was one of the greatest moments of her life, and they married in 1994.
René was there, all those years later, when I saw Celine again backstage at Caesars Palace. It was boiling hot. She was in an aqua ballgown, sopping wet from the storm that had been set up for the Titanic number, My Heart Will Go On. She wanted to get out of her wet dress.
I was with my friend Kevin who is a big fan. He was told by René to leave but Celine said, “It’s Chrissy. You know how she is. She’s too nervous to do things alone.” She accompanied this with a large theatrical wink, but René seemed not to notice. I’ve seen her do this wink many times – it’s a trademark.
So Kevin stayed and talked about how his favourite song was Because You Love Me. He asked her if she dreamed in French or English, which she said was a really good question but she didn’t know.
In hindsight, I think René didn’t want us to look at her in her sopping wet aqua-green dress. He got us bottled water and samosas. Celine said she couldn’t live without samosas.
By then, she was every inch a proper pop star – ageing in reverse. She didn’t complain about the heat or the wet dress. And she didn’t comment on the big songwriters who wanted to work with her. She was cool, and she’d never tried to be.
Celine first did IVF in her thirties and René-Charles, now 23, was born. He accompanied her to the Grammys in February this year.
Years after her first son’s birth she did IVF six times, one after the other. She was 42 and she must have been screaming with hormones. When I asked about it, she shrugged – not one of her theatrical shrugs. She decided, at 42, she was going to get pregnant. She wanted that most. It didn’t matter about anything else.
“I was never told that my health was in danger,” she said. “So I wasn’t going to stop. I wanted a baby. I knew IVF meant that there was a good chance of multiple pregnancy.
“When the test was positive, I had three babies inside of me. I had to go to the doctor every week because, if you’re in your forties, there is a good chance you’ll have high blood pressure or a Down syndrome baby …
“I went for an ultrasound every week and saw and heard the heartbeats of Baby A, Baby B and Baby C. One week, Baby C was not moving. Baby C had died. My husband and I shed a tear or more, then I reasoned to myself: The baby has passed to give the others more strength. Nobody wants to have a one-pound baby, so I focused on my two babies.”
As she told me this story, her eyes were wet. Her twins, Nelson and Eddy, are now 13. Motherhood, she told me, changed everything, including her attitude to her career.
“In the beginning I needed to prove myself to the industry. Not anymore. I’m doing this for fun,” she said. “Since my son was born, I know my job as a mother is much more important.”
Motherhood taught her to weep. “I cry at everything my son does. I am much happier now, though, because I have meaning in my life. Before, I was singing, fighting for my place, holding onto my dream. Now I have a son and I am in love with my husband and I am singing because I love expressing myself through music.”
That joy, however, was to be tried over and over. René was diagnosed with cancer three times. He had been declared in remission from skin cancer on the same day she’d discovered she was pregnant.
“Imagine facing life and death in one day,” she said.
Then René developed throat cancer, and the next time I saw her in Vegas, he was not there presiding over the show. She told me how she would feed him every day with a tube, even when he wasn’t hungry. She kept him alive until 2016.
Celine loved René with every fibre of her being. And she still loves being a mother to his children.
In May 2023, Celine cancelled her world tour due to her own ill health. It came after years of suffering and making excuses for missed engagements and cancelled shows.
When I heard the news, I recalled noticing, back in 2013, that her speaking voice had changed. It had become like a cat’s purr, very dry. And it was way back then that she now says she first began to experience vocal spasms.
“I woke up one morning and after having my breakfast, my voice started to go up,” she explains in the documentary. “It freaked me out a little bit because normally when you’re tired after doing a show the night before, your voice would go down … I was scared; I didn’t know what to do.”
Her voice was also “cracking”.
Celine suffers from stiff-person syndrome (SPS). It’s a very rare disease, affecting about one in one million people, and twice as many women as men. It is so rare that there has been little scientific research and there is no known cure.
Stiff-person syndrome affects muscles. Vocal cords are muscle, the diaphragm is a muscle, the heart is a muscle, so it has stolen her voice and sometimes she can barely speak.
Celine’s spinal cord is also affected. She is often in pain.
There was a time, she admits in I Am: Celine Dion, when she took massive doses of drugs to manage her pain and keep performing. She was taking “80 to 90mg of Valium per day, and that was just one medicine.
“I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I could have died … I was taking those medicines because I needed to walk, I needed to swallow, I needed to function … The show must go on.”
She paid a devastating personal price for keeping the Celine Dion show on the road. She hated lying to her audiences about the reasons she was cancelling shows, which is why, in 2022, she summoned the courage to make a public announcement about her condition.
And soon after, she retired from public life to begin an intense course of therapy and give her body time to heal. She has put on a brave face, but in fact has little control over her muscles and does painful therapy every day.
“Last year, I got to a point where I couldn’t walk anymore. I was losing my balance a lot. It was hard to walk. A lot of pain,” she tells her fans. And she couldn’t sing. She cries when she speaks about losing the ability to sing.
“Music – I miss it a lot. But also the people. I miss them.”
I Am: Celine Dion is raw and confronting and unashamed. It has made Celine cool again, and she still isn’t trying. But watching it, I can’t help but wonder whether she has made herself too vulnerable.
As a fan – and yes, I am one now – I sense a thin line between honesty and oversharing. There is a scene where she is having a seizure, her entire body spasming, and she is obviously in huge pain. It must have been her decision to include that. But why?
I think it’s because this documentary is a letter to her fans – a brutally honest letter filled with love and pain. There is certainly despair, but also a sense of hope, especially after she made her comeback at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, closing the show spectacularly on the Eiffel Tower.
Because she is so ridiculously positive, Celine believes that maybe one day she will beat SPS.
“I still see myself dance and sing,” she says, “and I always find a Plan B and C. You know, that’s me. If I can’t run, I’ll walk. If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl. But I won’t stop. I won’t stop.”
Sometimes it’s an effort to walk, an effort even to speak. She spent a lifetime loving to sing and the loss of that extraordinary voice has been heartbreaking. But there’s another message that the documentary delivers loud and clear: Celine is a star and that has never just been about singing.
She will shine on.
Stream I Am: Celine Dion now on Prime Video from $6.58/mth, with a 30-day free trial.
