Looking back at Celine Dion’s triumphant year, the inspirational pop culture story we needed in 2024

By Alli Rosenbloom, CNN

(CNN) — Perched atop of a platform on the Eiffel Tower at the start of the Paris Olympics in July, Celine Dion, gone for years amid a bitter health battle, marked her return in grand fashion with a rendition of Edith Piaf classic “Hymne À L’Amour.” It was, you could say, her own hymne à la résilience.

Dion announced in 2022 that she had been diagnosed with Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS), a rare neurological disorder. At the time, she said the condition did not allow her “to sing the way I’m used to.”

When she took the Olympic stage, seemingly closer to the heavens than the ground, she hadn’t performed live since 2020.

Just one month prior, the world was invited into her battle like never before via “I Am: Celine Dion,” which offered an intimate look at Dion’s return to performing live amid her battle with the disease.

“I think the performance really gave her confidence and also just really allowed her to show how far she’s come this last year,” Irene Taylor, who directed the documentary, told CNN in a recent interview.

As one of the most revered vocal talents of our time, Dion’s voice has been used to amplify some of the greatest stories ever told both in song and on the big screen. This year, she told her own story as she reemerged into public view, finding and sharing the power of her voice like never before.

Ready to return

At the end of “I Am,” viewers were left with the understanding that Dion desperately wanted to return to the stage. Her body’s ability to do so, however, remained the question.

In one scene toward the end of the documentary, Dion experienced a muscle spasm in her foot, a symptom of her SPS. It quickly escalated, leaving Dion unable to regain control of her entire body. Tears streamed down her face and she groaned in pain while her medical team quickly worked to treat her.

When Dion comes-to her physical therapist Terrill Lobo told her the episode was sparked by her brain being overstimulated. The cause? She’d been singing in the recording studio.

By then, Dion had been living with Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS) for years. It is a “rare, progressive syndrome that affects the nervous system, specifically the brain and spinal cord,” according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. The diagnosis caused her to pause her public life as a performer to focus on her health.

As she began plotting her return, she enlisted Oscar-nominated documentarian Irene Taylor to help document her day-to-day life as she worked to return to performing live.

According to Taylor, Dion was more than ready to tell her story at that point.

“It was very remarkable how comfortable she was with the camera right next to her and that told us a lot. I think we knew right from the get-go that she was going to be an open heart,” Taylor said.

Dion had sent Taylor and her crew “all the signals that said, ‘I’m ready now,’” which is what she said right before she filmed her emotional announcement that initially revealed her diagnosis, a clip she posted to her Instagram page in December 2022. Taylor briefly considered using “I’m ready now” as a title for the film. Ultimately, “I Am: Celine Dion” stuck, Taylor said, because she felt the title captured “the strength and dignity that she deserved, especially after being so vulnerable to my camera.”

To Taylor’s point, moments after Dion recovered from the aforementioned medical episode seen in the documentary, she stood up and sand along to Wyn Starks’ “Who I Am,” refusing to let her diseases defeat her.

Dion is no stranger to hardship, having dealt with the deaths of her parents, her brother and her husband René Angélil in recent years.

Shaun Brown, host of “The Celine Dion Podcast,” told CNN in a recent interview that Dion “could have easily just said, ‘You know what, I’m going to deal with the health now, I might never be back. I need to focus on what’s important.’”

“But she didn’t,” he said. “She made it very clear that she wants to go back to the stage and, my goodness, there is no bigger stage she could have picked.”

Showing and receiving love

Dion’s comeback performance during the Opening Ceremony lit a fire of its own and for months, fans and well-wishers from within the entertainment community carried the torch.

“If you know anything just about Celine right now, this is her purpose,” Kelly Clarkson, one of the Olympics commentators, said on air after the performance. “That she got through that, that was incredible. And in my field, she is the gold winner for vocal athletes.”

The moment had stuck with Clarkson so much that in September, the “American Idol” star honored Dion by dedicating a performance of a cover of “My Heart Will Go On” during the “Kellyoke” portion of her daytime talk show “The Kelly Clarkson Show.”

The clip went viral at the time and made its way back to Dion, who reacted to it in a video she posted on her own X page, saying, with tears in her eyes: “I just saw you singing ‘My Heart Will Go On,’ and I’m crying again. You were absolutely incredible, fantastic. I loved it so much.”

“Showing thanks to other artists and even just normal fans, that’s kind of always been there throughout her career,” Brown said. “When she’s done the big superstar duets before with the Bee Gees and Carole King and so on and so forth, there’s always been that mutual respect that she gives the artist to her performing with her and it comes back tenfold.”

Adele, long one of Dion’s fans, also paid tribute to her in October when Dion attended one of her concerts at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace.

Adele later shared a photo of the moment on her Instagram page, where she acknowledged that the venue in which her residency has taken place was the same one built for Dion when she first launched her Las Vegas residency “A New Day” over two decades ago. Addressing Dion directly, Adele also wrote about how meaningful it was to see Dion “back in your palace with your beautiful family.”

It’s that support that Dion has received from her fellow artists, as well as her fans, that Taylor thinks has helped fuel her return to public life.

“As she says in the film, it’s about the performance and you can’t give a great performance unless you really feel it and you really have it in your soul,” Taylor said. “I think the feedback from the fans does that for her.”

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