Celine Dion Is Still Aiming for Perfection

Yes, she was feeling it during her first Vegas residency, the one that began in 2003. And the follow-up. And during the 2008 world tour and the next tour and all the other tours after that. As Céline Dion remembers it in I Am: Celine Dion — a documentary that obscures her intellectual life while unveiling her physical one — her voice was the first part of her to register the symptoms of a rare neurological disorder called stiff-person syndrome. Normally, after a show, her vocals would drop at least a half-note. One day, she noticed her voice went up instead. Then it began to burn out. Sometimes she’d buy time onstage by turning the mic toward the crowd and asking them to sing, an act of desperation disguised as generosity. She kept doing shows, kept belting, kept swiveling her hips and waggling one leg like a lanky French Canadian Elvis. She vamped her way through the pain for 17 years, as her voice failed and her muscles rebelled and spasms turned to seizures. “By 2020,” she tells the camera, “I could barely walk.”