René Angélil discovered Celine Dion when she was 12 years old and helped her rise to international fame — but their relationship soon developed into something more.
Nicolas Laffont/Wikimedia CommonsRené Angélil, Celine Dion’s late husband and manager, in 2009.
In 1980, René Angélil was a rising star in the entertainment industry. He’d made a small name for himself as a member of the boy band Les Baronets and was managing the career of successful singers like Ginette Reno and René Simard. But his life was about to change forever — both personally and professionally.
That year, he received a tape of a young girl’s first original song. Her name was Celine Dion, and Angélil immediately knew that she was going to be a star. He mortgaged his home to finance her first album in 1981, and she quickly rose to international fame.
Then, in 1993, Dion made the shocking announcement that she and Angélil were engaged. Their relationship had started to turn romantic when she was 18 and he was 44. Despite the controversy over their 26-year age gap and questions about potential grooming, Angélil and Dion wed in 1994.
Angélil continued to act as Dion’s manager through 22 years of marriage, three children, and multiple cancer diagnoses. However, in 2014, he stepped down from his position as his throat cancer progressed. René Angélil died on Jan. 14, 2016, just before his 74th birthday. Celine Dion continues to honor her late husband, calling him “my greatest champion, my partner, and the one who always saw the best in me.”
Early Years In The Entertainment Industry
René Angélil was born in Montreal on Jan. 16, 1942. At 19, he started a band called Les Baronets with his childhood friends Pierre Labelle and Jean Beaulne. The trio mostly sang covers of popular English bands like the Beatles in French, and they achieved moderate success locally.
Angélil married his first wife, Denyse Duquette, in 1966. They welcomed a son together in 1968 but divorced in 1972. Angélil remarried in 1973 to singer Anne Renée and had two more children.
IMDbLes Baronets, with René Angélil in the center.
As Angélil’s first marriage was falling apart, so was his band. Les Baronets split in 1972, and instead of continuing his singing career, Angélil decided to try his hand at talent management. He teamed up with his friend Guy Cloutier and began working with Quebec stars Ginette Reno and René Simard.
“His intuition and his instinct were so strong, and not only were they strong, but he would follow them. He would follow his emotion,” Reno told the Montreal Gazette after Angélil’s death. “The branch he was connected to had something divine. I don’t know what. He was connected to something, to a cord that was magic.”
Then, in 1980, Angélil received a tape from Michel Dion, the older brother of Celine Dion. It featured 12-year-old Celine singing the original song “It Was Only a Dream.” That recording would change the trajectories of both Celine Dion and René Angélil’s lives forever.
A Professional Relationship Turns Romantic
Angélil recalled hearing young Celine Dion’s voice for the first time to The New York Times in 1997. “I listened to [the song] right away, and I couldn’t believe it,” he said. He invited Celine to audition in person and quickly agreed to become her manager.
“She wasn’t the cutest 12-year-old,” Angélil later said. “She had a problem with her teeth and she was very shy, but her eyes were incredible.” Her voice was incredible, too, and Angélil took the risk of mortgaging his home to finance Dion’s first album, La Voix du bon Dieu. It was an instant success.
Dion’s career exploded from there, and Angélil helped propel her to international stardom. During this time, Angélil’s second marriage also came to an end, with his divorce finalized in 1985. Not long after, Dion began to develop feelings for her manager.
Celine Dion/YouTubeRené Angélil and Celine Dion at the World Popular Song Festival in Tokyo in 1982.
As Dion said in an interview on Access Hollywood in 2013, “So maybe at 17, 18 years old, my feelings started to change for him. I kind of saw him differently.”
Their relationship started to turn romantic when Dion was 18, and she and Angélil were officially dating by the time she was 19 and he was 45. They kept it secret from the public for years, even after they got engaged in 1991. Dion finally revealed the truth in the liner notes of her 1993 album The Colour of My Love, writing, “René, for so many years I’ve kept our special dream locked away inside my heart. But now it’s too powerful to keep inside.”
René Angélil and Celine Dion were married on Dec. 17, 1994 — but four years later, they would face their first major obstacle.
Inside René Angélil’s Battle With Cancer
In 1998, Angélil found a lump on his neck, and he was ultimately diagnosed with throat cancer. Dion took a break from her music career to care for him, and he went into remission for over a decade.
Not long after his recovery, Angélil and Dion welcomed their first child together, René-Charles. They had two more sons, twins Eddy and Nelson, in 2010 with the help of in vitro fertilization.
ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock PhotoCeline Dion and René Angélil on their wedding day in 1994.
Throughout the early 2000s, Angélil continued to manage Dion’s career. He also made a name for himself in the gambling world. He qualified for the World Series of Poker in 2005, and between 2005 and 2006, he won over $250,000 playing poker at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas (and lost $230,000), as reported by the BBC in 2007.
Angélil’s gambling in Vegas — where Dion has held several concert residencies — also led to a bizarre scandal in 2002. Yun Kyeong Sung Kwon claimed she was gambling with Angélil at Caesars Palace when he followed her to another hotel and raped her. Angélil denied these allegations, but he paid Kwon and her husband, Ae Ho Kwon, $2 million. Mr. Kwon was later sentenced to 28 months in prison for attempting to extort another $13 million from Angélil in order to keep quiet about the purported assault.
But René Angélil’s troubles weren’t over. In 2013, he discovered that his throat cancer had returned. He underwent surgery, which involved removing part of his tongue, and it initially seemed to have worked.
Georges Biard/Wikimedia CommonsCeline Dion and René Angélil were married from 1994 until his death in 2016.
By 2015, however, he was rapidly declining. In an interview with USA Today that August, Dion said, “We have asked [doctors] many times, how long does he have, three weeks, three months? René wants to know. But they say they don’t know.”
“René says to me, ‘I want to die in your arms,’” Dion continued. “OK, fine, I’ll be there, you’ll die in my arms.”
René Angélil died at their Las Vegas home on Jan. 14, 2016, two days before he would have turned 74. His death hit Dion hard, and she has continued to speak about him and the impact he had on her life ever since.
“Before he left, it was very, very difficult for all of us,” Dion told CBS News in October 2016. “For me especially, and my children, to see the man of my life die a little bit more every day… I never kissed another man in my life. So the man of my life was my partner, and we were one. So when he stopped suffering, I said to myself, he’s OK. And he deserves not to suffer.”
After reading about the life and death of René Angélil, discover the remarkable story of June Carter Cash, the wife of Johnny Cash. Then, take a look at these 55 photos from wild music festivals of the past.