FINDING HER VOICE

More than a year after losing her husband, Céline Dion is back on tour.

It’s after midnight in Las Vegas, hours after Céline Dion has finished a performance of her long-running show at Caesars Palace. But if she’s exhausted, she has a funny way of showing it. Bubbling with energy, the FrenchCanadian dynamo is chatting about the giant bed she shares with her 6-year-old twins, Eddy and Nelson. “A woman here in Las Vegas does beds for the basketball players,” she explains, and then bursts into improvised song: “I said, ‘I need to meet you. I need to have a big, big bed,’ ” she trills. It’s not quite “My Heart Will Go On” but it captures Dion’s irrepressible spirit and her maternal devotion. “They go to bed with me and they wake up with me,” she says of her two young sons. “They’re show-business people. We’re all bats. Good bats.”

The sleeping arrangement was the twins’ idea, after their father, Dion’s beloved husband and longtime manager, René Angélil, died from cancer at age 73 in 2016. (Their oldest son, René-charles, 16, sleeps in his own room.) “I need to have my children comfort me every night,” she says. “And I think they need that. It takes time, but we’re coping very well.” And finding new ways to be happy. Single for the first time since meeting Angélil when she was only 12, now at 49 Dion is learning to go it alone—and broadening her horizons. She is heading out on a European tour, launching an accessories line and having fun with her own fashion. In May she made a splash at the Met Gala in a black Versace gown with a daring thigh-high slit—then afterwards posted a photo of herself dressed in head-totoe couture joyfully eating a

“It takes time, but we’re coping very well ”

New York hot dog. “It was a crazy, fun night,” Dion says about her Gala debut. “Crazy hair, crazy dresses. But a first is a first, and it was magnificent.” Three weeks later Dion moved an audience to tears with her emotional Billboard Music Awards performance of “My Heart Will Go On”, her 1997 hit from Titanic— a song her late husband persuaded her to record. “I feel fortunate to be able to do what I love in life,” she says. She still consults Angélil about major decisions, such as recording the song “How Does a Moment Last Forever” for Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast. “I have to see a picture of him and I talk to him,” she says. “I feel very powerful and in a good way in charge, knowing that my husband is making decisions with me.”

In some ways they will always be a team, now and forever. “It’s always going to be Céline and René,” she says. “I don’t want that to ever change.”

left) Dion and sons (from and Nelson Eddy, René-charles ride on the Storybook Land To at Disneyland in October. says, “We honour their dad, she a good time.” laugh and we have

Dion and the twins (right) arrived at the Royal Monceau hotel in Paris on July 17.

LIFE PARTNERS Angélil discovered Dion at age 12; they wed when she was 26. “I don’t have my husband next to me, but he’s within me,” she says.

Performing “My Heart Will Go On” during the 2017 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas on May 21.

IN THE 1990S Dion segued from demure “covered-up” stage outfits to more provocative numbers.

2017 PARIS “It’s such a chill look,” she says of her Elsa Schiaparelli couture ensemble. 2017 MET GALA Legging it in Versace: “The Met is not about being comfortable.”

1998 OSCARS In Michael Kors and the $1.4 million Heart of the Ocean sapphire from Asprey. 1999 OSCARS “It was avant-garde at the time,” she says of her Galliano suit. 1997 OSCARS “My husband freaked out,” she says of her plunging Chanel dress.

2017 PARIS Making a style splash leaving her hotel in headto-toe Roberto Cavalli.

2017 GRAMMYS In Zuhair Murad. “This is one of my favourites,” she says. “I like the high cut showing your legs.”