The Life Of René Angélil, From His Days In A Boy Band To His Marriage To Celine Dion

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”