Cecile Dionne, Who Found Fame and Despair as a Quintuplet, Dies at 91

New York Times

3 days ago

Cecile Dionne, who with her siblings found fame as the first quintuplets known to have survived infancy and who, of the five, was the most outspoken about the suffocating effects of celebrity, died on Monday in Montreal. She was 91.
A family spokesman, Carlo Tarini, announced the death, in a hospital, on Thursday night.
The Dionne sisters' birth and survival in rural Ontario may have been miraculous and a balm to a beleaguered public shuffling through the depths of the Depression, but her life was miserable.
'I resented everyone for the way we were brought up,' she said in an interview on her 50th birthday. 'Because of the accident of birth, we were not considered people.'
She and her sisters, only one of whom survives her, weighed a combined 13½ pounds when they were born at home shortly after dawn on May 10, 1934, to a struggling and already large farm family in Corbeil, about 215 miles north of Toronto.
Within hours, The North Bay Nugget, a local newspaper, wired the news of their arrival around the world, and the Chicago World's Fair offered their father a contract to display them. The quints became more famous than Shirley Temple, a bigger tourist attraction than Niagara Falls and irresistible prey for the greedy.
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