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| Single by Celine Dion | ||||
| from the album Let’s Talk About Love andTitanic: Music from the Motion Picture | ||||
| Released | December 8, 1997 | |||
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“My Heart Will Go On” is a song recorded by Canadian singer Celine Dion. It serves as the main theme song to James Cameron‘s blockbuster film Titanic, which is based on an account of the British transatlantic ocean liner of the same namewhich sank in 1912 after colliding with an iceberg in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. The song’s music was composed by James Horner, its lyrics were written by Will Jennings, while the production was handled by Walter Afanasieff, Horner and Simon Franglen.
Released as a single from Dion’s fifth English-language studio album, Let’s Talk About Love (1997), and the film’s soundtrack, the love power ballad became an international hit, reaching number one in all countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. “My Heart Will Go On” was first released in Australia and Germany on December 8, 1997, and in the rest of the world in January and February 1998.
One of the best-selling singles of all time, the song is considered to be Dion’s signature song. It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. The music video was directed by Bille Woodruff and released at the end of 1997. Dion performed the song to honor the 20th anniversary of the film at the 2017 Billboard Music Awards on May 21, 2017. With worldwide sales estimated at 18 million copies, it became the second best-selling single by a female artist in history, and the eighth overall.
James Horner had originally composed the music for the song as an instrumental motif which he used in several scenes during Titanic; the main theme of the song being inspired by the song “Flying Dutchman” by Jethro Tull. He then wanted to prepare a full vocal version of it, for use in the end credits of the film. Lyricist Will Jennings was hired, who wrote the lyrics “from the point of view of a person of a great age looking back so many years”. Director James Cameron did not want such a song, but Will Jennings went ahead anyway and wrote the lyrics. When Dion originally heard the song, she did not want to record it as she felt she was pushing her luck by singing another film theme song after Beauty and the Beast. Horner showed the piano sketch to Simon Franglen, who was working with him on electronic textures and synthesizers for the film score. Franglen, who had, himself, worked with Dion for several years on many of her major hits to date, programmed and arranged an extensive demo to take to Dion.
“My Heart Will Go On” won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Original Song. It dominated the 1999 Grammy Awards, winning Record of the Year — marking the first time to be won by a Canadian — Song of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or Television. “My Heart Will Go On” also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song in 1998.
The song also won a Japanese Gold Disc Award, for Song of the Year, as well as a Billboard Music Award for Soundtrack Single of the Year.
It has been named one of the Songs of the Century. It is one of the best-selling singles ever in the United Kingdom, selling over a million copies, the second single released by Dion to do so. This made Dion one of only two female artists to date to have released two million-selling singles in Britain. In December 2007, the song peaked #21 on VH1‘s “100 Greatest Songs of the 90’s”. In April 2010, the UK radio station Magic 105.4 voted the single the “top movie song of all time” after listeners’s votes. It was ranked at number 14 on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Songs, celebrating the 100 greatest songs in American film history.
Celine Dion & Sissel – My Heart Will Go On and Titanic Overture
| Titanic | |
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| Directed by | James Cameron |
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| Written by | James Cameron |
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| Music by | James Horner |
| Cinematography | Russell Carpenter |
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195 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $200 million |
| Box office | $2.187 billion |
Titanic is a 1997 American epic romance and disaster film directed, written, co-produced and co-edited by James Cameron. A fictionalized account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ship during its ill-fated maiden voyage.
Cameron’s inspiration for the film came from his fascination with shipwrecks; he felt a love story interspersed with the human loss would be essential to convey the emotional impact of the disaster. Production began in 1995, when Cameron shot footage of the actual Titanic wreck. The modern scenes on the research vessel were shot on board the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, which Cameron had used as a base when filming the wreck. Scale models, computer-generated imagery, and a reconstruction of the Titanic built at Baja Studios were used to re-create the sinking. The film was partially funded by Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox; the former handled distribution in North America while Fox released the film internationally. It was the most expensive film ever made at the time, with a production budget of $200 million.
Upon its release on December 19, 1997, Titanic achieved critical and commercial success. Considered one of the greatest films ever made, it was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, it tied All About Eve (1950) for the most Oscar nominations, and won 11, including the awards for Best Picture and Best Director, tying Ben-Hur (1959) for the most Oscars won by a single film. With an initial worldwide gross of over $1.84 billion, Titanic was the first film to reach the billion-dollar mark. It remained the highest-grossing film of all time until Cameron’s Avatar surpassed it in 2010. A 3Dversion of Titanic, released on April 4, 2012, to commemorate the centennial of the sinking, earned it an additional $343.6 million worldwide, pushing the film’s worldwide total to $2.18 billion and making it the second film to gross more than $2 billion worldwide (after Avatar). In 2017, the film was re-released for its 20th anniversary and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
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