Motherhood suits Celine Dion well. She believes it gives her emotional stability and makes her feel beautiful. Indeed, she seems to have undergone the ageing process in reverse. She started off looking rather geeky and launched a thousand jokes of, ‘Why the long face, Celine?’ But she’s not only grown into her features, she’s radiant.
Celine Dion, one of the biggest selling female
artists in the world, says motherhood has made her the happiest she has
ever been
René-Charles and twins Nelson and Eddy, who’ve just celebrated their third birthday – not even her wildly successful career as the bestselling female artist of all time would have been enough to make her feel she’d accomplished all she could.
All her children were born through IVF, and not without great difficulty in the case of the twins, who were originally triplets until one died in her womb three months into her pregnancy. Although she’s 45 and her husband, René Angélil, 71, she’d like another child, a little girl to play with the three boys.
‘I don’t have to do any of this,’ she insists. She means performing and recording. Having already sold 200 million records she’s about to release a new album and is currently appearing at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where me meet just after her stage show, which features a raging real-water storm for the Titanic number My Heart Will Go On.
When we’re face-to-face it’s 110ºF outside at midnight and hotter inside, because the air-conditioning isn’t working. She doesn’t complain.
‘I do it because I love to sing. I’ve worked hard for nearly 30 years and I feel like only now is it paying off in terms of happiness. But the only reward that would mean anything to me is my children. There’s nothing that can top being a mother. I would like more but I don’t know if it could happen. I want the twins and me to have quality time. It’s selfish to keep wanting more, although I would love a girl. Imagine all the shopping, the jewellery, the shoes, the dresses I could give to her.’
Celine and her family (center left to right) Nelson, Rene-Charles, Eddy, and husband René Angélil
Her twins came through a determination that is super-human. Her first son René-Charles, had been an IVF baby and she had embryos frozen for future planning. ‘For the twins I did IVF six times one after the other.’ Her hormones must have been screaming? She shrugs. ‘I don’t know. You might have to ask my husband that. I was not over-emotional, not even tired.
‘I’d done five years at Caesars Palace and went half a year around the world on tour and it was finally time to get pregnant again. I thought as long as my health permitted me and unless my doctor thought physically I couldn’t do it, then I would go on with the IVF until someone told me to stop.
With any
pregnancy, whether it’s through IVF or not, you feel a danger. You have
to remain positive and try to relax as much as possible. I always say
that my children’s first country is inside of me, so I try to make it a
good one and be healthy.’
Although she's 45 and her husband, René Angélil, 71, she'd like another child, a little girl to play with the three boys
She’d had René-Charles when she was 33 and knew that getting pregnant at 42 was going to be even harder. ‘So I had to deal with it. I was going to do whatever it took and of course there was a window of doubt. I was 95 per cent positive, five per cent doubting. I didn’t want the doctor to call me and say, “I’m sorry, it’s not going to work.”
‘I needed to protect myself a little by thinking that I already had one child. I couldn’t make all my life, my spirituality, my strength, my happiness, dependent on the next pregnancy. I would say to René-Charles, “I hope you are going to have a brother or sister,” and each time when it didn’t work I’d tell him, “It didn’t work, we’ll try again.”
‘We signed a contract to return to Caesars Palace after my world tour, and we had to postpone two or three times. If they’d said, “You want babies, but we need a singer,” I would have understood. I told René that I couldn’t stop. I had to try and try and try all the way.
‘People stop because it’s very expensive but I kept on going, I was not going to stop just because I had a contract for singing. I would have hated every song for the rest of my life, so I said try to postpone the Caesars Palace shows because it wasn’t a good enough reason for me not to try for a baby. A life or a contract? I couldn’t live with that.’ Cancelling the Vegas contract would have cost her millions but that wouldn’t have been a problem – she is reputed to be worth £300 million.
She knew that IVF meant there was a good chance of a multiple pregnancy and says that when the test was finally positive, ‘I had three babies inside me. It was unbelievable. Every week I would go to the doctor and there would be three heartbeats. The doctor was freaking out because in your forties if you’re expecting more than one baby there’s a high risk of Down’s syndrome. You’re also at risk of pre-eclampsia.
Celine holding her son Nelson accompanied by her husband Rene Angelil who is holding twin brother Eddy
‘I went for ultrasound every week and saw baby A, baby B and baby C, but one week baby C was no longer moving. Baby C had died. It was three months into the pregnancy and at that stage the baby is tiny. It doesn’t even come out.
‘My husband and I shed a little tear. Then you reason to yourself that that baby has let go for a good reason. It was to give more strength to the other two babies. Who knows what might have gone wrong if three had remained? I didn’t have to make any decisions, any choices, I just focused on my two babies, and they got stronger and bigger. When my twins were born they were 5lb 10oz and 5lb 4oz, almost 12lb of baby. I gained 60lb in all. That was just belly.
‘I had a C-section. I’d had one with René-Charles at the last minute when I was already in labour. That was hard but because it was twins they recommend the C-section and I wanted healthy babies. It wasn’t a fashion choice. We scheduled it carefully. We wanted to wait till the babies were at least 5lb.’ She was 35 weeks pregnant when she gave birth to twins Eddy and Nelson on 23 October, 2010. They remained in a neonatal intensive care unit for several days.
Dion herself comes from a huge family.
The youngest of 14, she grew up in Charlemagne, Quebec, where her
father, Adhémar, was a lumberjack and money was extremely tight
She says the twins love to dress up. ‘They have very different personalities but both of them love to wake up first thing in the morning and go to their closet and decide what they will wear.’
She is determined not to be separated from her boys for longer than is necessary, and as her contract at Caesars is for 70 shows a year she has bought a house nearby. ‘After the last song I change very quickly and do a runner. I’m home at 10 o’clock to be with my babies.’
Does she find it hard to juggle being a mother of three and performing? Isn’t it difficult to shift the focus?
‘I’m not sure there is a shift of focus. When I’m on stage my kids are with me in my head. When I’m home my head sings songs. I don’t bring them with me because I don’t want to live that showbusiness life. I want to go home and get into my PJs and sleep.
‘In the morning one of my biggest pleasures is to have my kids round me and coffee with double cream, no sugar. I hold the cup like it’s a little bird nest. It comforts me. At night I go to bed and my kids are sleeping and I can’t wait for tomorrow to have my coffee and my kids. It’s the simple pleasures of life that make the most sense.’
Celine not only grown into her features, she's
radiant. She explains, in that quirky French-Canadian accent, that it's
her family who give her that glow
Dion herself comes from a huge family. The youngest of 14, she grew up in Charlemagne, Quebec, where her father, Adhémar, was a lumberjack and money was extremely tight. ‘I was on stage ever since I was a child and I was busy professionally at 12,’ she says with a wistfulness in her voice.
She’s always claimed that her family were wonderful and loving, yet growing up was torture for her.
One of the songs on her new album, At Seventeen, by Janis Ian, is particularly emotionally resonant for her. When she performs it in her Las Vegas show it brings much of the audience to tears because it’s about being ugly and rejected, which she felt at that age. Today, she is a glamorous star but she still exudes graciousness and humility, probably because she grew up tormented over her looks.
‘It was hard for me. I was not pretty. Going to school was difficult. I was skinny and my teeth were really bad and we didn’t have the money to fix them with braces. I didn’t have these’ – she gestures to her now perfectly formed sparkling whites.
Celine is an odd mix, a diva who is humble. She has never been cool, yet she’s incredibly popular
‘I don’t know if it’s normal that at eight you feel this way. I just know I love maturity and I never want to be eight or 25 again.’ At 26 she married René, who was 52. She admitted earlier this year that her marriage hadn’t always been easy. ‘There were tensions, and our life together was not going at all smoothly’, she said. ‘Then a good friend taught me how to communicate better, and we were soon back on track’.
She is an odd mix, a diva who is humble. She has never been cool, yet she’s incredibly popular. Half the tracks on her new album are songs she sings on stage, and the rest are ‘songs by amazing writers’. Now, she says, her life couldn’t be better. ‘But as far back as I can remember, both my parents gave me wonderful values in life, a foundation of love and support. As soon as I went into showbusiness my mum was with me all the time. She didn’t trust anybody.’
René had become her manager when she was 12 and he was 38. At the time he had a bit of a bad-boy reputation. He’d been married twice. ‘My mother didn’t trust him. She wrote to him to take care of me but she stayed with me till I was 18. I learnt a lot by meeting a lot of older people with experience.
‘In my early 20s I fell in love with René but we were hiding it from the world because it was impossible to fall in love with a man who had three children and was married twice. It was a no-no with my mum.’ She bows her head and for the first time looks as if she’s talking with difficulty when she remembers this. She shifts in her seat when she says it was deemed ‘inappropriate’.
Celine says she now feels more beautiful and more strong than ever before
‘When he first started managing me he was married. I was not involved with him but people imagine things. It was not proper, it was not the right thing to do.’ His marriage had been dissolved by the time she sang for Switzerland in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1988, aged 20. In the euphoria of winning the song contest she kissed him and has said that kiss was one of the greatest moments of her life. They married in 1994.
‘And today I feel more beautiful and more strong than I ever have. I don’t want to be busier than busy. I don’t want my kids to feel I’m not there for them. I’ve wanted them for too long for that. I want to make the most of them. Now the simplest things make me happy. I’ve got a feeling the sky’s the limit. I don’t feel I can’t do this any more. I feel like I want to do everything; enjoy time with my children, enjoy the growth of my twins, and I also love to sing.
‘I didn’t think about children in general when I was young, but when love came into my life and I got married and I had money and success I was like, “What’s missing?” For a long time I thought, “That’s the price for me to pay for success. I’m from a big family. I now have a lot of money, I’m not going to be able to have children, you have to pay a price, you can’t have it all”.
‘It was quite self-punishing. Then I told myself, “I’m going to try to have it all. I’m going to try very hard.” And it happened.’
Celine’s new album, Loved Me Back To Life, is released on Monday. Visit www.celinedion.com.
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