Celine Dion must be the hardest-working woman in show business--or at least the one with the most frequent-flyer miles. In the first half of 1996, the French-Canadian songbird chirped her way through concert tours of Australia, France and Canada; went on a press junket to London; picked up a World Music Award in Monte Carlo; dropped into New York City three times for TV appearances and a recording session; and jetted to Prague to film the video for her new single, It's All Coming Back to Me Now. She owns two houses in Montreal, but until she breezed through town in April for three sold-out concerts, she had not set foot on either of her doorsteps for six months. And all this activity was merely a warm-up act for her big moment of the year--performing for the planet at the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Atlanta.

Dion savored her star turn beneath the Olympic flame, but not for long. As soon as the world-class athletes hit the pool and track, the world-class singer hit the road again for a 30-concert tour of the U.S., from Boston to Seattle. In September she lands in Monaco to begin a 47-concert conquest of 12 European nations, and in 1997 it's on to Asia. Her travel agent can soon retire in luxury.

At 28, Dion is the very model of a modern global diva--and a record company's dream girl (Sony Music's dream girl, to be specific). In an era in which rock stars are increasingly irritable about interviews and tours, Dion will crisscross continents, perform every night, answer stupid questions, cut ribbons or do whatever else it takes to get songs up the charts. "It's show business," she says wearily. "I'm not necessarily happy about doing it. But if I do a record, I can't just sit down and tell somebody else to do the work." The payoff has been worth the effort: her latest album, Falling into You hit No. 1 in England, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Austria and Australia, and No. 2 in Canada, the U.S. and Japan.

World tours and international fame are nothing new, of course, but never before have record companies pursued foreign currency with such fervor. Albums are now "regionalized"--tailored to local tastes. That's why Boyz II Men, Madonna and, yes, even French-speaking Celine Dion have put one or more songs sung en Espanol on albums bound for Spain and Latin America. Dion slipped a Spanish version of All By Myself (Sola Otra Vez) on Falling into You.

While Dion didn't pioneer multilingual recording (ever heard the Beatles' rendition of Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand?), she is unusually successful at it, despite her decidedly provincial origins. The youngest of 14 brothers and sisters whose parents owned a restaurant in a small town outside Montreal, Dion began singing professionally and recording albums at age 13. But the high school dropout didn't start learning English until she was 18, or release an English album until she was 22. Now she's a superstar in both her native and her adopted tongues, alternating French albums with English ones. Her latest French release, D'eux, was No. 1 in France for 44 weeks, making it the biggest-selling album in French musical history. It was knocked out of the No. 1 spot this year by, you guessed it, Falling into You. "I'm competing with myself," Dion laughs.

Still, there are new markets to conquer. With sales lagging in Japan last year, Sony persuaded a TV network to let Dion provide the theme song for a 10-part romantic mini-series called Lover. Enhancing Dion's dulcet tones was a violin accompaniment supplied by the Japanese group Kryzler & Kompany, and no one seemed to mind that the song, To Love You More, was in English--the Japanese bought 1.5 million copies. But will the singer now have to spend almost as much time in the language lab as in the recording studio? "I didn't want to do the Spanish song," she admits. "What do they want me to do next? Learn Japanese?"

In Canada, where Dion is becoming almost as big an institution as ice hockey (she sells out the same arenas), people have mixed emotions about the transformation of their local darling into a global commodity. Wrote Mark Lepage in the Montreal Gazette's review of Falling into You: "The music is an even more seamless, interchangeable version of the last seamless album, but international ballad-singer fame is a cruel mistress, and she demands the generic as payment...All the years of careful coaching...mean the 1996 Dion has been cleansed of any remnants of her provincial background."

Outside Canada, critical opinion varies as sharply as Dion's vocal range. Wrote Jeremy Helligar in People, a magazine based in New York City: "While an ice queen like [Whitney] Houston will rarely risk sounding merely human, Dion, bless her love-struck heart, tosses, turns and melts in the heat of passion." In Who, Australia's equivalent of People, Barry Divola railed against the slickness of Falling into You: "Yes. Celine sells millions. But this album is so calculated you wonder if the bigwigs really trust in her talent." With her sales, Dion hasn't had to concern herself with what critics think.

What does concern her is preserving the ability to hit those high notes night after night. Ever since she lost her voice during a 1989 concert in Sherbrooke, Quebec, she has been following a doctor's orders on how to protect her precious pipes. On the day of a concert she does not speak until 4 p.m., and an upcoming recording session can make her mum even longer. Says Jean-Jacques Goldman, the renowned French songwriter who collaborated with Dion on D'eux: "Before Celine goes into the studio, it's three days of total silence. Everything's in writing, everything."

The rigors of being a global diva are as hard on the psyche as they are on the voice. Fortunately for Dion, her manager, who travels with her, is also her husband. Rene Angelil, 54, a French-Canadian impresario of Lebanese descent, has guided Dion's career since she was 12, but the professional relationship turned romantic at some point after she turned 19. They kept the affair secret for several years, fearing what people would think. But the worries were needless: when the couple married in December 1994 in Montreal's grand Notre Dame Basilica, Canadians rejoiced as if it were a royal wedding.

For their honeymoon, all Dion wanted was three weeks with no interviews at a getaway house that she and Angelil had bought in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. It was not to be. After a week or so, Think Twice started becoming her first big hit in Britain, and Sony needed her in London to appear on the Top of the Pops TV show.

But every diva deserves a break, and Dion is determined to have one. After the Asia tour in early 1997, she plans to retreat to Florida for at least a year off, and her No. 1 objective is to become a mother. "I'm not going to try to beat my parents and have 15 kids," Dion says, "but I would love to have children." And her manager believes his role as a husband should take precedence for a while. Says Angelil: "It will be good for us, for our health, for our lives. For four years we haven't stopped."

Well, we'll see what the folks at Sony have to say. Dion herself realizes that a year out of the spotlight is--for her--a long time: "After two months, it will be hard. After I've done all my cleaning and cooked up all the leftovers in the fridge, I'm going to start thinking of performing on stage." Once a diva, always a diva.

--With reporting by Michael Fitzgerald/Sydney, Victoria Foote-Greenwell/Paris, Irene M. Kunii/Tokyo and Gavin Scott/Ottawa