Midway through a recent phone interview, Céline Dion abruptly breaks off. “Just a second, honey, I want to wave to my fans,” she says. Suddenly, the 48-year-old diva can be heard cheerily saying, “Bonjour! Hallo!” while the sound of screeching worshipers comes through the line.
Her limo is entering the backstage entrance at the Centre Bell arena in Montreal, Dion later explains, during a summer residency in Quebec.
After more than 220 million albums sold worldwide, that’s the sort of reaction the Quebec native (who releases her latest French-language album, “Encore un soir,” or “Another Evening,” next Friday) should be used to. But this year, the adulation has been turned up a notch. Dion has made a triumphant comeback to music following the death of her husband, manager and mentor, René Angélil, at the start of the year.
“My fans have so much empathy for me,” she says. “At every show now, I feel like 20,000 want to hug me and ask me, ‘Are you OK? We love you!’ ”
Céline and René had been married for 21 years when he died in January, succumbing to throat cancer at 73. After an initial cancer diagnosis in 1999, he had been in remission until the end of 2013. For the last months of his life, Dion fed him through a tube, while simultaneously trying to comfort her children (René-Charles, now 15, and twins Nelson and Eddy, 5).
“It’s very hard to explain what it’s like to see my husband die, every day in front of my eyes, and then go in the kitchen to try and make meatballs, or play hide-and-seek with my kids, then go back and see my husband die even more,” she says.
More distress followed when Dion’s brother Daniel died two days after René, also from cancer. Already grief-stricken, Dion couldn’t make it to Daniel’s funeral.
At the time, Dion was in the midst of recording the album, but took a break to deal with the twin tragedies, and she admits that it feeds into the music. “It’s not all sad songs, but lyrically, we definitely do get close to the most difficult time of my family’s life.”
But Dion has emerged from the darkest of winters. At the Billboard Awards in May, she received the Icon award — presented to her by her son René-Charles as a surprise — and brought the house down with a swaggering version of Queen’s “The Show Must Go On.” Even though Dion has rarely been a critic’s darling, it won plaudits the world over.
Her style and wardrobe have also been revived. Dion recently became enamored of the looks sported by teen Disney star Zendaya, and through some quick Googling, discovered her stylist was “America’s Next Top Model” judge Law Roach.
The two spent a month in Paris picking out new styles and, before long, the woman known mainly for rocking ball gowns and evening dresses was spotted in the front row of shows by Giambattista Valli and Christian Dior. Dion has also been wearing strikingly hip Vetements gear that would make Kanye jealous.
“Law has been suggesting a lot of things for me, and I’ve loved it,” she says. “If you’re not having fun with shoes, bags, dresses and jewelry, you might as well be naked!”
“What people don’t understand about Céline is that she’s always been cool — we’re just seeing it more now,” says Roach, adding that the stylistic rethink has come hand-in-hand with her recovery from Angélil’s death. “I think the clothes have played a part in her happiness.”
It was her husband who convinced Dion to sing her biggest hit — the Oscar-winning “My Heart Will Go On,” which was the theme to James Cameron’s epic “Titanic.” Almost 20 years on, it’s impossible to hear the opening flute notes without thinking of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet standing with arms outstretched, at the front of a boat like a pair of gormless scarecrows.
“I didn’t like the ‘Titanic’ song when I first heard it,” she admits. “Before it starts [when singing live], sometimes I’m like, ‘Oh, this song again.’ But then people start freaking out, and then I forget I’ve been singing it for 20 years. They have the T-shirt, the blue heart necklace [as worn by Winslet in the film], they even do the ‘Titanic’ position. That song is stuck to me for the rest of my life — it’s like an octopus!”