Celine Dion In Las Vegas

Celine Dion was Born March 30, 1968, in Charlemagne, Quebec, Canada. The youngest of 14 children of Adhemar and Therese Dion, she grew up in a close-knit musical family. Her parents formed a singing group, Dion's Family, which toured Canada when Celine was still an infant. They later opened a piano bar, where the five-year-old Celine would perform to the delight of customers.

By the age of 12 she had written one of her first songs, "Ce N'etait Qu'un Reve" (It Was Only a Dream), which she recorded with the help of her mother and brother and shipped off to a manager named René Angelil, whose name they found on the back of an album by Ginette Reno, a popular Francophone singer. After weeks with no response from Angelil, Celine's brother Michel phoned him and said, "I know you haven't listened to the tape, because if you had, you would've called right away.

Angelil dug up the tape and called the family back the same day to set up a meeting with Celine. When the 12-year-old performed in his office in Montreal, Angelil cried and set in motion the process of making her a quebecois, and later international, star. He mortgaged his house to pay for her first two albums, producing a local number one single. In 1983 she became the first Canadian to have a gold record in France and she won a gold medal at the Yamaha songwriting competition in Japan. Her worldwide reputation was in the making, but success in the United States was not yet forthcoming.

Her 1990 breakthrough album, Unison, was released in the U.S. by Epic Records and produced several hit songs, but it was her duet with Peabo Bryson on the theme song of Disney's Beauty and the Beast that was her true breakthrough. "Beauty and the Beast" reached number one on the pop charts and won both a Grammy and Academy award. The song was al featured on her second English album, 1992's Celine Dion, which launched another Top Ten American hit with "If You Asked Me To," while spawning two additional Top 40 singles, "Nothing Broken But My Heart" and "Love Can Move Mountains.

Dion's first album since 2001's A New Day Has Come, which in turn heralded the opening of A New Day on March 25, 2003. That live Las Vegas show was documented on the summer 2004 release New Day: Live in Las Vegas, which was followed a few months later by Miracle, a collection of family songs designed as a tandem book/CD project between Dion and photographer Anne Geddes. The two-CD compilation On Ne Change Pas appeared in 2005, featuring her most popular French-language songs and a new collaboration with the operatic pop vocal foursome Il Divo, "I Believe in You (Je Crois en Toi)." A new French-language
album, D'Elles, arrived in May 2007 and debuted at the top of the Canadian album chart.

In November of that same year, Dion released the English-language Taking Chances and announced a tour of South Africa and Europe scheduled for 2008.