Céline Dion has sold more albums than anyone in Canadian history—over 200 million.

The pride of Charlemagne, Quebec, has topped 50 million in sales in Europe alone.

And today, her countless fans around the world, including millions in her home province, are wishing her the best on her 50th birthday.

Back in 1981, Dion's manager and future husband, René Angélil, mortgaged his home to finance her first album, La voix du bon Dieu, which turned her into a teenage success in Quebec.

She worked hard on her English and conquered the anglophone market with Unison, which was released in 1990. From there, the hits kept coming as she sang the title track for Disney's Beauty and the Beast, "My Heart Will Go On" for James Cameron's Titanic, and scores of other memorable songs.

Despite her success, Dion endured more than her share of barbs from anglophone music writers who recoiled at her unabashed sentimentality and schmaltz. In their eyes, nobody was less cool than Céline, who lacked the subtlety and finesse of their preferred musicians.

This topic was explored with considerable intelligence in Canadian writer Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, which took its name from Dion's 1997 album Let's Talk About Love.

He examined Dion through a cultural lens, noting that her popularity with certain audiences, such as Filipinos (to cite one example), sharply contrasted with the way she was seen by the arbiters of taste in the English-speaking media.

And Wilson questioned whether many insular anglophone music writers were even capable of objectively writing about Dion because of their own cultural biases.

"If you have never heard Céline Dion in French," Wilson wrote, "it's hard to believe it's the same singer. Her cadences are much more supple and controlled, her interpretations more detailed. Gone is the blank persona that reduces many of her English songs to vocal stunt work, replaced by what can only be called soul."

Wilson revealed that he began investigating Dion as an "experiment with an abstract question about how taste functions". Little did he know at the outset that he would learn so much about himself by researching her connection with her fans.

"I cringe when I think what a subcultural snob I was five or ten years ago, and worse in my teens and twenties, how vigilant I was against being taken in—unaware that I was also refusing an invitation out," he admitted in the book.