Four Years Ago, She Was Diagnosed with Stiff Person Syndrome. Now, Celine Dion Is Back.

Somewhere in the bowels of Palms Casino Resort, just off the Las Vegas Strip, is a recording studio that has seen countless victories. Michael Jackson recorded tracks for the reissue of his seminal Thriller album here; Lady Gaga recorded Harlequin, the first compelling concept album tied to a Hollywood film in years. One evening in June, though, something even more extraordinary is happening: Céline Dion is doing Pilates. She stands with her leg up on a ballet barre, wearing a nude leotard with a lace-trimmed high neck. The singer is lithe and poised, her hair in a perfect bun, mascara coating her lashes. With ease, she slides her leg along the barre, stretching into a wide split.

This victory is hard-won: In 2022, Dion was diagnosed with stiff-person syndrome, an extremely rare autoimmune neurological disorder that can cause muscle stiffness tantamount to paralysis. At times, Dion was in such debilitating pain that she could barely walk. Some days, she’d have to take a high dose of Valium simply to function. “It is a progressive condition. I don’t like to say ‘disease.’ Disease makes you go like this,” she says, scrunching her nose: “ ‘Kevin, you’re such a disease.’ ” Though she has the bearing of royalty, Dion has the personality of a Muppet, never leaving much time between cracking a joke or Tetris-ing her body into another position. (Because SPS can freeze her muscles into place, she likes to keep moving.)

In some ways, stiff-person syndrome was a cruel twist of fate. That Dion, the youngest of 14 children from a poor family (one bath a week!) in a small-town suburb of Montreal, would become one of the best-selling singers of all time, an icon to the gays/all of Canada (but Quebec especially)/lovers of heartbreak/West Indians/movie-soundtrack aficionados, inspiring a fervor strong enough to make gods jealous, felt like a one-in-a-million chance, a miracle. That stiff-person syndrome is believed to affect only one or two people per million proves that luck goes both ways.

The room is tricked out with weights, a treadmill, and a reformer machine in addition to the ballet barre. I am encouraged to take a seat next to the piano. Her trainer, Naomi, tells her she’s getting more flexible, which makes Dion slightly panic: “Too flexible?” (Thankfully, no.) Dion has performed only once in the past six years—at the Paris Olympics—and has been itching to return to the stage.

It’s not just that performing has been her life since she was 12. Having to disappoint her fans—canceling shows at the last minute with no firm explanation before suspending an entire tour in 2023—made her feel insane, unreliable, and rudderless. What’s worse is that she felt like she’d lied to her fans. She had experienced symptoms for 17 years before receiving a formal diagnosis in 2022; before then, she’d cancel a show citing a sinus infection or cough when, in reality, the kinds of health challenges she was confronting were far more profound. In the 2024 documentary I Am: Céline

Dion, viewers saw what she had been living with: the pain punching holes in her voice; the handfuls of benzos she needed to take to get through the day; an SPS episode that left her stricken and crying, unable to move or communicate.

Dion talks about performing as if it is her earthly duty, a covenant between herself and her divine talent. That she has regained control of her body and its ability—and was able to announce, as she did earlier this year, a five-week residency in Paris, beginning in mid-September—is tantamount to a miracle.

After Pilates wraps up, Dion sits with me, covered in a thin monogrammed sweater and dusty-rose track pants. A humidifier near her is set to precisely 23 degrees Celsius. John, her co-manager, shows her a photo of her sons at the Stanley Cup Finals. (Does she like hockey? “No, I love my kids. That’s different.”)

Now that Dion can finally perform again, it is as if her life, a lost item, has been returned to her. She announced the news in an Instagram post in March, calling it a 58th-birthday present to herself: “This year, I’m getting the best birthday gift of my life. I’m getting the chance to see you, to perform for you.” She said she was feeling strong, excited, and a little nervous but ready to come back. Tickets sold so quickly that she has already started selling dates for a three-week residency in May 2027. “It’s
been so long, I would like to offer them something to show how I’ve missed them,” Dion says.

Annie Horth, her head of wardrobe and creative adviser, promises something “grandiose,” a show that will use broad architectural strokes to reveal the diva’s many dimensions. “She goes from intimate and romantic to a vocal powerhouse, so we are creating something where she navigates that,” Horth says.

Dion’s as-yet-undiagnosed symptoms began to flare up in 2020, coinciding with the onset of the pandemic. She continued isolating for three more years, in part because she didn’t want fans to see her and assume that she was having a full, happy life but still canceling on them. During this time, she fell in love with nature. “I love trees so much, and I had this vision of myself trying to disappear through the leaves,” she says. But it was fall, and the leaves fell, so everyone could see her, their baskets in hand. She couldn’t produce the apples they’d always come to her for. “I was trying to tell them, I’m sorry, I don’t have any apples to give you anymore.” Then she heard a voice: “But we did not come for the apples; we came for the tree.”

To Dion, this is a true revelation. But this is who she’s always been, earnest and strange, in a way that allows people to access their emotions. She is so deeply herself that it’s contagious.

Dion has been maligned for making corny “no-brow” music since she was an adolescent. From the late ’90s into the aughts, Dion’s name became shorthand for schlock and too-muchness. But there’s something about her—besides the voice—that perseveres, keeps her part of the cultural conversation. What some see as corny, others see as earnestness so powerful that it can withstand the shifting waves of cool. Being born a poor, French-speaking Quebecois made her an outsider in her own country. And yet she’s managed to unite people through her love for love. For years, Dion’s music has been a place for catharsis, for releasing emotion without caring about how it makes you look.

As a child in Quebec, Dion dreamed of being a gymnast after seeing Nadia Comaneci earn perfect scores at the 1976 Olympics. “She was the idol of every girl my age,” she exclaims, eyes wide, still as awed as the day it happened. “They didn’t even have space on their freaking board because she had a perfect 10 and they didn’t know how to write one!” Other talents presented themselves, and then she became too tall, so she woke herself up from that dream. But she made three goals for herself, the first of which she jumps out of her chair to illustrate: “I wanted to sit straight, and I could not. I basically sat like this.” She hunches her back briefly, then ambles back into the chair, settling with her legs crossed. The others were to have the ability to touch her toes and to do splits. Now she can do all three.

Dion’s entire body is pliable, especially her face, which is an instrument she uses nearly as deftly as her voice. Depending on the emotion, her upper lip will recede back to her nose or jut out like she’s trying to touch someone with it. Her eyebrows are always on the move. To say that she is prone to breaking out into song is to say something like “Las Vegas can be warm”—a dramatic minimization. Dion sings as punctuation, intensifier, transition, evidence of joy; over two hours, she sings everything from “That’s Not My Name,” the electro-pop handclapper by the Ting Tings, to “Here Comes the Bride” because someone comes into the room carrying white flowers, to Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” because honesty is a virtue, to “Ce n’était qu’un rêve,” her first single, which her mother wrote for her. It’s why, in addition to being known as one of the finest singers of her generation, she’s also made her mark as a meme queen, her off-the-cuff moments endlessly clipped around the internet. While in the middle of telling me about her love for climbing trees—“I’m a monkey”—she scampers four feet up the scaffolding on the wall, extending her arm out to me, like God did to Adam.

It was uncomfortable to put her interior life on display in the documentary, but then again, the reason she’s had this unbelievable life in the first place is her fans. They deserved answers; in many ways, the only reason she got answers—a diagnosis after almost two decades of symptoms—was that she had the status afforded to her by her fans. “They paid for tickets,” she says. “They bought my records. They gave me that luxury. So the least I can do is tell them that I’m alive.”

After her diagnosis, Dion committed to intense rehabilitation: new meds, physical therapy, vocal therapy, immunotherapy. There are no FDA-approved treatments for the condition, so in 2024 her foundation donated $2 million for research into autoimmune neurological disorders. In preparation for the Paris shows, Dion is doing 90-minute Pilates sessions three times a week; on two other days, she takes ballet classes with a local company. She describes this period as falling and getting back up repeatedly. She is proud of herself for achieving something that her body wasn’t “born to do.” And best of all, she’s done hiding inside and is reemerging into public life. Now that she is better, she returns back to work, even the annoying parts. But she recognizes that her relationship with her fans goes both ways. “Well, girl,” she says, talking to me but addressing herself, “if you don’t want to sign autographs and you don’t want to get yourself pretty and you don’t want to be disturbed because your pasta is going to get cold, you can always stay home. But look at what you have.”

Singing was one of the Dion family businesses. Operating her father’s piano bar in Charlemagne, Canada, about 40 minutes from Montreal, was another. The entire family ran the place; her brothers played piano, her sisters sang, and her mother cooked French fries, “peeling the potatoes in the buckets of cold water,” Dion says, pantomiming everyone’s routines. Occasionally, young Dion would be allowed to sing one or two songs before her mother shooed her back home. Eventually, people started to call the bar to ask if the little girl would be singing that night. “Ten years old and I’m in a bar. I could’ve been arrested,” she says. “But you know what? The police officers joined and sang with us.” She smiles. “There was not a lot of crime then.”

Her life changed when she met the music producer René Angélil, who became her manager starting from age 12. They began dating when Dion was 19, and their lavish 1994 wedding at the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montréal, when Dion was 26 and Angélil was 52, was broadcast on television. Their 26-year age difference understandably ruffled feathers, but the pair remained happily married until Angélil died of throat cancer in 2016.

Dion released her first single at 13, which made her a Quebecois celebrity, representing French-speaking Canada on a national stage. After winning Eurovision for Switzerland in 1988 when she was 20 (because the competition doesn’t have a citizenship requirement, countries can recruit noncitizens), she began recording music in English and released her first English-language album, Unison, in 1990, cementing her crossover appeal. She has always maintained, though, her allegiance to the French language, and she speaks to her three children in only French, letting them learn English and Spanish in school.

We all know what happened next: the number-one hits, the best-selling albums, the Grammys, the world tours. Dion became a colossus of pop music, an acknowledged diva up there with Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston, inspiring the next generation of belters. The Australian singer-songwriter Sia recalls watching one of Dion’s concert films as a teenager where Dion evoked the sound of every instrument on stage with her: “At one point, she mimicked the bass solo, and then she mimicked the flute solo, and then she mimicked the guitar solo, and she mimicked the drums,” says Sia. “That was one of the moments that made me want to be a singer.”

“My love for ballads is definitely a direct pass down from her,” says Adele. “She’s dramatic, and I love being a drama queen.” One night during Adele’s Las Vegas residency, she spotted Dion in the audience and burst into tears, leaving the stage to embrace her. That Adele could have such a residency is also Dion’s legacy: Her 2003–2007 “A New Day …” show redefined the Las Vegas musical residency. It was no longer the last resort for fading stars but rather an opportunity for record-busting extravaganzas. “A New Day…” is still the highest-grossing residency of all time.

If Dion’s life has been marked by extreme highs, there have also been profound lows. In 2016, she lost one of her brothers and her husband within two days of each other. In 2003, the day she found out her father had died, she still performed that night. There was no better way for her to work out her feelings than to dive directly into them, held by the same people who had kept her afloat for decades.

She kept insisting on finding personal strength on stage and through her fans, so I ask: What is it about you that makes them love you so much? She tuts while she thinks. “It’s got to be because I’m an open book,” she says. As if on cue, the lights flicker. She has to be this way, she explains; if she kept everything to herself, she couldn’t be herself. She couldn’t live her life. “I’m honest, and it’s not always pretty,” she says. “Sometimes it’s happy things, sometimes it’s sad, but it’s called life.” No one knows this more than her. “Instead of questioning life, can you live life? So I’m living my
life, girl. I’m living the life.”

This story appears in the September issue of

Harper’s Bazaar

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Hair: Shay Ashual; makeup: Lauren Parsons; production: Casa
Projects. Special thanks to Caesars Palace Las Vegas.

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