Céline Marie Claudette Dion is a Canadian singer. Noted for her powerful and technically skilled vocals, Dion is the best-selling Canadian recording artist, and the best-selling French language artist of all time. Her music has incorporated genres such as pop, rock, R&B, gospel, and classical music.
Born into a large family from Charlemagne, Quebec, she emerged as a teen star in her home country with a series of French-language albums during the 1980s. She first gained international recognition by winning both the 1982 Yamaha World Popular Song Festival and the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest, where she represented Switzerland. After learning to speak English, she signed on to Epic Records in the United States. In 1990, Dion released her debut English-language album, Unison, establishing herself as a viable pop artist in North America and other English-speaking areas of the world. Her recordings since have been mainly in English and French although she has also sung in Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, Japanese, and Chinese.
During the 1990s, she achieved worldwide fame after releasing several best-selling English-language albums in music history, such as Falling into You (1996) and Let's Talk About Love (1997), which were both certified diamond in the US and over 30 million sales worldwide each. She also scored a series of international number-one hits, including "The Power of Love", "Think Twice", "Because You Loved Me", "It's All Coming Back to Me Now", "My Heart Will Go On", and "I'm Your Angel". Dion continued releasing French albums between each English record; D'eux (1995) became the best-selling French-language album of all time, while S'il suffisait d'aimer (1998), Sans attendre (2012), and Encore un soir (2016), were all certified diamond in France. During the 2000s, she built her reputation as a highly successful live performer with A New Day... on the Las Vegas Strip (2003–07), which remains the highest-grossing concert residency of all time, as well as the Taking Chances World Tour (2008–09), one of the highest-grossing concert tours of all time.
Dion is also one of the best-selling music artists of all time, with record sales of more than 200 million worldwide. Although her releases have often received mixed critical reception, Dion is regarded as one of pop music's most successful vocalists. She has won five Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year. Throughout her long standing career, she received two honorary doctorates in music degree from Berklee College of Music and Université Laval. Billboard named her the "Queen of Adult Contemporary" for having the most number-one songs on the radio format for a female artist. Dion is the second best-selling female artist in the US during the Nielsen SoundScan, the 8th all-time best-performing top female artist in the United States, and the sixth all-time best-performing female soloist in Billboard 200 history. In 2003, she was honoured by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) for selling over 50 million albums in Europe. In 2008, Dion was recognized as the Best-selling International Artist in South Africa.
