During her long career, Celine Dion has multiplied the awards from the Grammy Awards to the Oscars through the Victoires de la Musique. Among her first prizes gleaned, we find in particular two Yamaha Awards, in 1982. Forty years ago, the young singer participated in this singing competition in Japan with the title so much love for you and then won the Tokyo Grand Prize as well as the Special Orchestra Prize. A few days later, she was celebrating at a banquet that she still remembers today…
It was Georges-Hébert Germain, who published an official biography of Celine Dion in 1998, who recounted the funny misadventure of the Quebec diva. “A few days after the festival, Celine performed five songs at a grand gala attended by ambassadors, senior officials and ministers of the Japanese government. At the banquet she sat with her mother [la défunte Thérèse, NDLR] at the head table. After a small, heavily flavored soup that she had somehow managed to swallow, they brought her what she feared, raw fish, with herbs, a little rice, strange sauces (…) and believing that it was a pea puree similar to what ‘he [son manager René Angélil, NDLR] had already given her a taste in Lebanese restaurants, she took a mouthful of wabasi mustard. She thought her head was going to explode. Through her tears, she saw all the heads turning towards her, terrified…“, he wrote.
At the time, the young Céline had no knowledge of world cuisine and mainly consumed “good family cooking“prepared by Thérèse as “pies and meat pies, hash, boiled meat, meatloaf“So of course his mistake was forgivable.”She was offered water, sake, coke, sugar… As soon as she had come to her senses and explained through her interpreter what had happened, there was general laughter.“, added the biographer who specifies that she refused a steak to honor her promise to honor the local cuisine, which touched her hosts. “She was the queen of the evening. His neighbors, delighted, full of solicitude, worked to extol the treasures of Japanese cuisine“, said the biographer.
The interpreter of the tubes For you to love me again, If it were enough to love, In another world or We do not change has already had the opportunity to discuss his culinary preferences, starting with… couscous!
40 years of songs by Celine Dion: the stars sing for Sidaction on France 2 on March 24 at 9:10 p.m.