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

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.

But they also became the center of a custody dispute involving their parents, the doctor who helped deliver them in the Dionnes’ home, and the province of Ontario, which feared for the babies’ welfare.

The parents, Oliva and Elzire Dionne, were already raising five children when the quintuplets were born, and they would have three more. Though they were not receiving relief payments from the government, as most families in the area were, the Dionnes were just scraping by in a farmhouse without electricity, according to Sarah Miller in her 2019 book, “The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets.” The father, Oliva, was working as a gravel hauler.

In the end, the babies were made wards of the state and would remain so for nine years, until their parents regained custody.

As for the doctor, Allan Ray Dafoe, who arrived after midwives had delivered the first two babies and just as Cecile was entering the world, he took an instant liking to celebrity.

He teamed up with province officials to create a gilded prison for the infants, a vast compound known as Quintland. An observation balcony was built so that the girls could be viewed by tourists, who numbered as many as 6,000 a day, many of them buying bumper stickers that read, “We have seen the Dionne quintuplets.” Behind a seven-foot-tall barbed-wire fence and protected from both germs and kidnappers, the babies were isolated from all companions or relatives except one another.

Cecile and her sisters were attended by nurses, teachers and a large domestic staff. Each evening, Dr. Dafoe would telephone and bid them each good night. As they grew, the girls spoke a combination of French, English and gibberish known as Quint Talk. They wore identical clothes at all times, were wheeled around in identical wicker baby carriages and, when the time came, had identical bicycles.

News reels and magazine covers immortalized their daily baths, their simultaneous tonsillectomies, their annual five-tiered birthday cake and, being Roman Catholic, their first Holy Communion. They were visited by Clark Gable and Mae West. They met the queen of England and christened war ships.

Their likeness helped sell Quaker Oats, Carnation condensed milk, Lysol disinfectant and Colgate toothpaste. Only one person, a Toronto photographer, was allowed to photograph them. And they loved the camera, jostling for position and never needing to be told to “say cheese.”

“They grew up before our very eyes,” the historian Pierre Berton wrote in “The Dionne Years — A Thirties Melodrama” (1977). “Pound by pound, inch by inch, just like our own children.”

Little is known about the years after the quints returned to their family in 1943 — the same year Dr. Dafoe died, at 60. Their farmhouse was replaced by a 20-room yellow brick house, complete with utilities paid for with money from the quints’ trust fund.

The girls never bonded with their eight other siblings, and they were more attached to Dr. Dafoe than to their parents. As soon as they turned 18, all of them — Yvonne, Annette, Cecile, Emilie and Marie — fled, four to suburban Montreal and Emilie to a convent, where she died of suffocation during a seizure when she was 20.

More heartache followed. Marie was hospitalized for depression, and her two daughters were placed in foster homes. She died at 36. Annette, with three sons, went through a divorce. So did Cecile, who by her own account had married “the first man who took me for a cup of coffee.” She had five children in five years, including a set of twins, one of whom died at 15 months.

In 1995, when they were past 60, the three surviving quintuplets said in a ghostwritten book that their father had sexually abused them as teenagers — an accusation that their other siblings denied and that some critics suggested had been motivated by a hope that the book would be a big success. It wasn’t.

But the sisters had sued the province of Ontario for compensation, and after a public uproar, they received a $2.8 million settlement, which seemed to secure their financial future.

Impoverished, hobbled after a hip replacement and with failing eyesight because of macular degeneration, Cecile was forced into a shabby old-age home, again a ward of the state. Annette helped her by buying a refrigerator for her room and paying for haircuts. The sisters talked several times a day and, as always, completed each other’s sentences.

Besides her sister Annette, Ms. Dionne is survived by three children, Claude, Patrice and Élisabeth Langlois, and two grandchildren.

But an Iowa family, the McCaugheys and their septuplets, born in 1997, arguably were the beneficiaries of the Dionnes’ legacy. The surviving Dionne sisters wrote them a cautionary letter, which was printed in Time magazine. It warned the McCaughey parents that “multiple births should not be confused with entertainment, nor should they be an opportunity to sell products.”

“Our lives have been ruined by the exploitation we suffered,” the Dionnes continued. “If this letter changes the course of events for these newborns, then perhaps our lives will have served a higher purpose.”

Jane Gross, a former reporter for The New York Times, died in 2022. Ian Austen contributed reporting.