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Canada|Annette Dionne, Last of the Celebrated Quintuplets, Dies at 91
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/world/canada/annette-dionne-dead.html
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She was the first to crawl, the first to cut a tooth, the first to recognize her name, and the last to die. And, like her sisters, she resented being exploited as part of a global sensation.
Dec. 26, 2025Updated 8:38 p.m. ET
Annette Dionne, who shared in her siblings’ fame as one of the first quintuplets known to survive infancy but who distinguished herself as the sturdiest, the most musical and generally the first in line when the girls, captured in Depression-era newsreels, were paraded here and there in identical bonnets and dresses, died on Wednesday in Beloeil, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal. She was 91 and the last surviving sister.
Carlo Tarini, a family spokesman, announced the death, in a hospital, on Friday, saying the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Of the Dionne quintuplets, indistinguishable in many ways, Annette was the first to crawl, the first to cut a tooth and the first to recognize her name, according to Life magazine, which chronicled the unparalleled celebrity of five babies born in an Ontario farmhouse before dawn on May 28, 1934.
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The saga of the Dionne quintuplets began as a flash of happy news in the dreary depths of the Depression. At a combined weight of 13 pounds, 6 ounces, they survived — in a farmhouse lit by kerosene, without much in the way of plumbing — on water and corn syrup until breast milk was donated.
But there was money to be made in the publicity maelstrom. Among the beneficiaries, all with sketchy motives, was the Dionnes’ hometown, North Bay, Ontario, where the girls’ birthplace became a huge tourist attraction, bigger than Niagara Falls, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and spawning new hotels and highways.
