The Governor General of Canada

“Where there’s music in your life,” says Céline Dion, “there is happiness.”

And there has never been a time when music was not an integral part of Dion’s life. The youngest of fourteen children who grew up in the town of Charlemagne, east of Montreal, she was named after a song called “Céline” that was released two years before her birth. At the age of five, she sang at her brother Michel’s wedding – her first public appearance. From then on, she sang with her siblings at the family-owned piano bar, Le Vieux Baril.

Dion knew exactly what she wanted from an early age. “I had one dream”, she says of her adolescence. “I wanted to be a singer.” She was twelve years old when the aforementioned Michel sent a demo tape of his youngest sister singing “Ce n’était qu’un rêve” to music manager René Angélil. Moved to tears by what he heard, Angélil took on Dion as a client and mortgaged his house to finance her debut album.

His faith was well placed. Céline Dion is the best-selling female artist the world has ever seen, with album sales approaching 250 million. Her first record, “La voix du bon Dieu,” in 1981 quickly made her a star in her home province. The francophone world beyond Quebec likewise embraced her. D’eux, released in 1995, remains the best-selling French-language album in music history, and, in 2008, Dion received France’s highest award, the Légion d’honneur. Dion’s breakthrough into the English market came in 1991 when she sang a duet with Peabo Bryson on the title track of the Disney animated film Beauty and the Beast, which later won an Oscar for Best Original Song.

A mezzo-soprano with a five-octave vocal range, Dion has produced more than forty albums, garnering five Grammy Awards and twenty Juno Awards along the way. One critic called her a “vocal Olympian for whom there ain’t no mountain — or scale — high enough.” Another called her voice “a sweet siren that combines force with grace.” Dion’s enduring theme in her work is love, and her signature song remains “My Heart Will Go On,” the Oscar-winning song from the movie Titanic.

In 1994, Céline Dion married René Angélil at Notre Dame Basilica. (Angélil’s funeral on January 22, 2016, was held at the same location.)

Music, and especially live music, remains Dion’s passion. “I can’t explain it, other than it’s magic,” she says. Virtually singer-in-residence in Las Vegas, she gets a standing ovation from her four-thousand-strong audiences even before she has sung a single note. For all that, family comes first. “What I’m most proud of,” she said in 2015, “what I consider my biggest success, is my family — my three beautiful children… I want to be remembered as the best mom in the world.”